


Sin Eater

by diadelphous



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Language, M/M, Plotty + Introspection, Post-Movie(s), Terms of Enrampagement, Tinker Tailor Winter Soldier, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 01:13:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 28,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1532150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadelphous/pseuds/diadelphous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve sets out to find Bucky; Bucky sets out to get revenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Winter Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> It's my understanding that there's a Marvel character named Sin-Eater; the title is not a reference to him. Sorry if I got your hopes up!

_"When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall_."

-Brian Doyle, "Joyas Volardores"

* * *

 

The soldier stares down at him, grainy from being blown up beyond life-size. The exhibit hall is crowded—kids and their parents, couples with their arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, one rowdy school group stringing themselves out all the way down to the exhibit’s entrance—but the Winter Soldier doesn’t register any of them. The only thing that matters is that photograph.

It’s _him_.

It’s him but it’s not him. He doesn’t remember taking the picture. He doesn’t remember fighting in World War II, and he doesn’t remember the man with blond hair whose face is plastered all over this exhibit, the man he had dragged out of the Potomac because it felt _right_ in a way that he couldn’t imagine rightness feeling. Because he _knew_ him. But he doesn’t remember him.

Someone jostles against his back. The Winter Soldier tenses, ready to fight, ready to kill—but it’s only a little girl in a sweater and a pink-and-purple tutu. She stares up at him. He glares back. Her eyes widen in fear and she whirls around and runs off. The Winter Soldier turns back to the photograph. His blood is up, adrenaline coursing through his system. For half a second, he thought he’d been caught.

If they catch him, they’ll punish him, send shocks of white heat up and down his spine. That is one thing he remembers. The pain of electricity.

He doesn’t want to get caught.

The Winter Soldier takes a step back, eyes still on the photograph. The crowd surges around him. He thinks that if he stares at it long enough he’ll remember something, even if it’s just the scent of pine trees and cordite, the sound of men yelling, the flash of the camera bulb.

Nothing.

He turns, lets himself sink into the current of the crowd. It winds through the exhibit, past photographs and interactive displays and images, over and over, of that man with the blond hair. _Captain America_ , the information cards read. _Steve Rogers_. He recognizes the names, but only because they were told to him by his handlers. Just names. Just a mission. The missions themselves always fill him with a prickle of anticipation, excitement—but the names are only ever names. Who he’s killing, it doesn’t matter.

The displays start to blur together. The exhibit hall’s tall ceiling amplifies the voices of the crowd into a loud humming noise that reminds him of electricity. His stomach knots, but he pushes through, staring up at the images, hoping that in the blur of them he’ll find some detail to latch on to. He weaves through the exhibit, deeper and deeper. This place is a labyrinth.

He passes a darkened room, recorded voices spilling out, talking about Captain America, and how he’s the encapsulation of honor and glory and other abstractions the Winter Soldier knows are meaningless justifications from men who don’t want to admit that they like killing, too.

The path veers sharply left. The Winter Soldier follows it because he has no real choice. The voices chatter around him. He hates all these people, wishes he could be here alone. Maybe then he could think. Maybe then he could remember.

The crowd is pressing around a display on the far wall. More photographs. The blond man at the center of a V made of soldiers. _The Howling Commandos_ , says the sign hanging overhead. That soldier is there, the one that looks like him. That _is_ him.

The Winter Soldier pushes through the crowd, trying to get a closer look. The display is not just photographs: there are clothes, too, uniforms. Captain America’s uniform is missing, a sign politely informing the spectators that it’s been taken down for repair, and the Winter Soldier has a flash of the Helicarrier, his fist pummeling into the blond man’s face, blood splattering across a red-white-and-blue jumpsuit. His gaze floats left, to the neat little information card. _James “Bucky” Barnes_. It’s just a uniform, brown and drab, like the ones he’s seen in old war footage.

Dots of light flicker at the edge of his vision. He can feel his heart pounding against his ribcage. It’s just a uniform. A buzzing starts at the back of his head, a low mean whine. Electricity. It’s just a uniform. The buzzing grows louder and louder and the dots of light flicker faster and faster and the Winter Soldier can’t move, he can only stare at the uniform as a heat of rage rises up through his body, and even though it’s just a uniform from a war that ended seventy years ago, and even though he doesn’t remember it, doesn’t remember the way the fabric felt against his skin or the way the belt cinched against his waist, that uniform makes the Winter Soldier want to kill.


	2. Steve Rogers

“Do you see anything useful?” 

Steve leans over the drafting table, the contents of the file spread out in a wide semi-circle. Tony stands next to him, hands on his hips.

“It’s hard to tell,” Tony says. “You might not have noticed, but everything’s in Russian.”

“You mean you don’t speak Russian?” Steve pauses. “I thought you were a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.”

Tony gives him a sideways glance. “I never should have said that you.”

Steve just shrugs, suppresses a smile.

“And to answer your question—no, not fluently. I should be able to figure something out, although don’t expect it tomorrow. I need time.” Tony steps away from the table and pushes one hand through his hair. Steve feels an uncharitable trickle of irritation that Tony is the only one who can help him out with this. At least Steve knows he’ll do it. Eventually.

“I’ve got shit to do,” Tony adds, although he sweeps up half of the documents into a loose pile and says, “Jarvis, start looking into anything  you can find about memory erasure, Soviet-era experimentation, anything like that.” Tony slides the remaining documents over to Steve. “You’ll be wanting these, I’d imagine.”

Steve looks down at the messy scatter of papers. Bucky’s enlistment photo isn’t among them—Steve has already slipped it out of the file and tucked it into his billfold, behind a credit card he never uses. But everything else is included, the whole history of Bucky’s imprisonment and torture and brainwashing. Steve’s got the translated files on his computer back at the hotel, but he wants to keep the originals close at hand.

Steve still hasn’t read through everything. Whenever he tries, he gets a feeling in his chest like he’s drowning.

“Thanks,” Steve says, scooping up the papers. “And thank you for—” He gestures at the half of the file that Tony’s keeping. Technical schematics. Steve can’t understand them—it’s a dual language barrier, not just the Russian but the diagrams for a technology beyond him. Still, he’s certain that whatever it is, it will help him understand what happened to Bucky.

“I really appreciate it,” Steve adds, and he thinks he doesn’t sound sincere even though he is.

Tony shrugs, dismissive. “Not like you’ve got the power of SHEILD behind you anymore.”

Steve stiffens. No, he doesn’t. And neither does Tony. Steve can see that little glimmer of grief in Tony’s expression, too, although he knows Tony will never admit to it.

“Yeah,” he says. “Guess we really have to work together now.”

Tony laughs, short and sarcastic. “Thought we’d accepted that after New York.”

“I hoped so.” 

They fall into that awkward silence that always seems to plague them we’re they’re alone, just the two of them. Steve shoves his hands into his pockets.

“Thanks,” he says again. “Let me know if you find anything.”

“Will do.” Tony gives an ironic half-salute, although he’s still hunched over the schematics and not looking at Steve at all. Steve lets himself out of the workshop. The house is empty—Miss Potts is off on a business trip in Taipei—and has that echoing hollowness that reminds Steve of certain government offices. The kind he gets called to whenever he has a mission—or got called to, rather. He’s set the Captain America uniform aside for the time being. SHEILD, such as it is, has fragmented, those agents not loyal to HYDRA slipping into undercover roles so that SHIELD is not an organization so much as an idea. And Steve isn’t sure he wants to be Captain America right now anyway. He wants to be Steve Rogers, skinny little kid from Brooklyn. 

And he has to be Bucky’s friend. He’s the only one Bucky’s got.

Outside, the California air is balmy and warm and smells of oranges and car exhaust. Steve climbs onto the rental bike and roars down the steep road and into the canyon. The hotel isn’t too far from Tony’s mansion, and Steve gets there without having to deal with much of that Los Angeles traffic. The building is old for 2014 but it still looks modern to Steve, those curved art deco arches. Funny, how he can get used to glittering glass and metal in DC and think nothing of it, but he comes out here to LA and sees one hotel from the thirties and it’s like he never left.

Steve parks his bike in the garage and rides the elevator up to the suite he’s sharing with Sam. It’s empty, too, and there’s no note or, for that matter, message on his phone (he still can’t shake the habit of checking for notes first). Sam must not have finished up with Allie Veselov yet. It was a weak lead, even Steve knew that—the daughter of one of the laboratory assistants listed in the files Natasha had given him. She’d emigrated to the US as a child after the Berlin Wall fell and in all likelihood didn’t know what her father had been up to before she was born, but aside from Tony reverse engineering that machine in the file, it was the only lead they had.

“We’re pretty lucky, really,” Sam had said when they were waiting for security in Dulles. “Tony Stark won’t fly out here, but we’ve got to fly out to LA anyway.”

He was right, but Steve still feels overwhelmed by the whole thing. Not hopeless—never hopeless. He’s not going to give up. And he never, not once, thought it was going to be easy. Because if something’s worth doing, it’s probably not going to be easy.

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t left wondering what the hell they’re going to do next, especially if Sam’s conversation with Miss Veselov doesn’t give them anything new.

Steve glances at the backpack he’d tossed onto the floor when he came into the room. His chest tightens. There’s still the rest of the file, the part that’s not names and dates and bland military euphemisms like _asset_ or _target_. He know he needs to look at those documents more closely. Needs, specifically, to look at the ones that hurt.

_If something’s worth doing, it’s probably not going to be easy._

Steve pours himself a glass of water, gulps it down. The laptop is sitting on the desk in the common room, innocuous-looking. Steve still feels like the files it contains are going to leap out at him somehow and attack. 

But he still sits down in front of it. Flips it open. There’s a picture of the Washington Memorial in the background and Steve stares at it for a moment, gathering up his courage. God, fighting Bucky on the Helicarrier had been easier than this. But Steve is trained to fight. He’s a soldier. And at least when he was facing down Bucky, he knew it was _Bucky_ , and he knew there was still a fragment of goodness inside him. The men that corrupted and tortured him—Steve doesn’t think he’s going to find any goodness there.

He runs his finger over the trackpad and double-clicks the icon to open up the translation. He ought to bring the originals in here, since there are pictures that didn’t make it to the digital copy, but he’s not sure he wants to think about pictures yet.

Well. Maybe one. Steve pulls out his billfold and slips the picture of Bucky out from its hiding place. Steve stares down at it. Bucky peers out at him through the smoky haze of the damage of time. Hair neat, cropped short, not hanging long and lank in his face. It’s the Bucky Steve remembers, even if he looks flat and faded in that photograph.

Steve props the photograph up next to the laptop, takes a deep breath, and starts to read.

He begins with the parts he’s looked at a couple of times before—the capture of Americans at Azzano, a brief outline of the procedure told in the dull language of scientists. The procedure itself doesn’t sound so different from what happened to Steve—inject the subject with an experimental serum and it should improve his strength, dexterity, stamina, recovery speed. Bucky was chosen because he fought back against his guards one too many times; he showed “spirit,” as the report put it, “and a tendency toward violence that Doctors Gersten and Zola felt could be exploited for maximum benefit.”

A tendency toward violence. Bullshit. Bucky fought those guards to protect his men. He’d told Steve about it afterwards, sitting up in their tent one night swapping a cigarette back and forth. The guards would taunt them, torture them. Bucky was sick of it, wanted to put a stop to it.

Steve forces himself to keep reading. This is all from the time Bucky and the rest of the POWs were imprisoned; it’s mild stuff compared to what comes later. Steve pours over it, looking for something he missed the first time, the second time, the third time. 

And then he comes to the fall.

Not the fall itself, of course: there’s nothing about that in the file, nothing about the horror of watching Bucky pitch backwards toward the snow and that terrible sense of something stretching out from Steve’s chest, as if Bucky’s plummet had ripped Steve’s soul out his body.

Instead, the file discusses finding Bucky lying at the bottom of the ravine, his left arm shattered and crushed. It discusses the elation of HYDRA when they realized that this fallen American was the same Subject 38 they thought they had lost during the Allied raids, that the serum must be a success if the soldier was frozen but still alive, that they could use his ruined arm as a chance to test a new engineering process—

Steve closes his eyes. This is when it starts to hurt. Bucky had already begun to transform when he and Steve fought together. He hadn’t been the Winter Soldier, not even close, but there had been hints there, and Steve only saw them in hindsight. If he’d seen them in the present, the present-past, during the war—maybe he could have helped him. Somehow.

Steve pushes away from the table, pours himself another glass of water. He’s been through this before. Even talked about it with Sam. The guilt can’t change anything. It’s not going to go away, Sam had told him, but Steve can’t let it overpower him. It’s a part of him now, and always will be, but he can only let it be a small part of him. And Steve knows that’s true.

He takes a deep breath. He knows what happens next in the file: the engineering procedure was a failure, but HYDRA froze Bucky rather than let their experiment go to waste. They woke him up during the Cold War (a war Steve still has trouble conceiving of, even after reading page after page of histories on the Internet) and, with space-age technology, rebuilt his arm. And trained him.

And used him.

This is where Steve always has to stop. The reports discuss the methods they employed to control Bucky, to shape him into the assassin they wanted him to be. The machine is involved somehow—they call it rehabilitation, but to Steve it just seems like a form of punishment. “Rehabilitation at regular intervals is proving necessary to control the asset,” the translation reads, flat black text against a white screen, utterly normal-looking. “Without rehabilitation, the asset grows volatile and erratic. He is difficult to control. One laboratory assistant has already been hospitalized.”

Steve forces himself back in front of the computer, fingers gripped tight around the water glass. His heart is racing. It gets worse as he goes down, but he knows he has to read this, knows he has to find _something_.

“23 October 1965. The asset has refused a mission for the first time.” _Good on you, Bucky_ , Steve thinks. “It has been 24 days since rehabilitation, 78 days since activation. This is a cause of concern for Doctor Zharkov and myself, as it brings into question the project’s success. However, we remain convinced there is a solution.

“25 October 1965. Corporal punishment is proving effective when combined with rehabilitation. The asset responds well to pain and physical threat. This has the added benefit of shaping him for his purpose—these extreme times call for an extreme weapon, as Commander Gribov has said many times. We find that a weapon is best forged of violence, and the asset has begun undergoing rigorous training. It is not necessary for him to remember who he is. Indeed, it is better that our training sessions form the framework for his identity. We will shape him with bloodshed.”

Steve takes a deep breath. His fingers are damp with condensation from the glass. He looks over at the Bucky in the photograph, handsome in his uniform, gazing up at Steve from out of the past.

“It’s still there, pal,” he whispers. “Who you are.”

The Bucky in the photograph doesn’t reply.

Steve turns back to the report, tries to put the pieces together. The “training” involved sparring to the death, as far as Steve can tell, but also other things—something to do with doctors rooting around in Bucky’s brain, giving him ideas. The reports claim the ideas were there to begin with, that his “natural tendency toward violence” made the process easier, that it was only a matter of changing Bucky’s ideas about right and wrong, but Steve knows they’re lying. They didn’t know Bucky as a kid, defending Steve against the bullies who tormented him in back alleys and parking lots.

“2 June 1971. It’s proving effective to put the asset under ice when his work isn’t required. Such a finely-tuned but specialized weapon is not to be wasted on issues of minor concern, and freezing eliminates the need for regular rehabilitation as well.”

Steve feels a jolt of satisfaction. Six years later and he still wasn’t doing what they wanted. That’s the Bucky that Steve knows. Still hanging in there.

It takes a long time, but Steve manages to read through the rest of the reports. He has to stop, drink water, pace around the hotel suite—but he finishes. Sam’s still not back, but when Steve remembers to check his phone he finds a message waiting for him. _Interview a bust. Caught in traffic. Fill you in when I get home_.

Steve sighs, glances over at his open laptop. The reports are minimized so he doesn’t have to look at them. He realizes he’s shaking. Not because of Sam’s message, but because of everything he’s read, everything about Bucky and the Winter Soldier—everything about the _asset_. God, he hates that word.

All that horror and he didn’t find anything useful.

He has no idea what they’re going to do next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the lovely laventadorn and I were talking about how Winter Soldier is basically The Avengers meets Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and when I was proofing this chapter I realized how TTSS-ish it is (the next chapter actually has a direct homage to a scene from the book and movie both), what with Steve sitting around reading documents the whole time. The exciting field of spycraft, everybody!
> 
> Also, I wanted to say thanks for the kudos and such I've gotten so far!


	3. The Winter Soldier

When the Winter Soldier is activated and assigned a mission, they give him living quarters and make like he’s a free man. And it’s true he can come and go as he pleases, no guards on him. But that’s because when he comes and goes, it’s to complete a mission. What the hell else is he going to do?

But sneaking off to the Smithsonian, that’s not typical for him. He knows that much. His handlers would call it _erratic_ , a word that makes him think of bright lightning shooting straight into his skull. Acting erratic means getting punished. It means electricity.

And so when he leaves the Captain America exhibit, his thoughts still buzzing with the promise of revenge for a crime he can’t even remember, he sits down on a bench underneath a tree until he’s thinking clearly again. He watches the tourists walk by. It calms him, these people going on about their lives like the world’s a safe place.

He’ll need names. Recon. Has to do most of that shit himself for the missions, anyway—the intel they give him never amounts to much. The Winter Soldier knows the value in waiting. He knows the value in acting, too, striking fast and deadly like a snake before disappearing back into the shadows, and as much as he wants that right now he understands this isn’t that kind of work. He doesn’t have the mask of his reputation, not with this. HYDRA knows he’s not a ghost. 

He sits out in the falling light for an hour, and then he goes back to Headquarters.

His living quarters are undisturbed when he returns, the air motionless and unchanged. He locks the door behind him, switches the security system over to at-home mode, grabs his pistol out of one of the empty kitchen drawers and jams it into the holster around his waist. Couldn’t take it with him and he felt naked without it. 

Now. Intel.

It won’t be easy to come by. He can’t remember names. Or faces, for that matter. It’s just like with the blond man, though—something’s locked inside his head, waiting. A key to his past. He can’t remember but he knows it’s there, knows it has something to do with the soldier in the photographs, with the man on the bridge. With the electricity they send jolting through his systems whenever he displeases them.

The one thing that is not unclear to him is that he’s been fucked. Badly. By HYDRA. Because who else but HYDRA would have done it?

It’s tempting to start with his handlers and work his way up. Wouldn’t be the first time he’s attacked them, either—the memories are hazy, but he can grab onto glimpses of them, his arm lashing out to choke or pummel, handlers’ blood bright red on the gleaming metal of his fingers. Five or six gun barrels bearing down on him afterwards. 

He’s not stupid enough to do it, though. Those memories come with them a sense of a confinement, electricity, important faces hovering just out of recollection’s reach, and he knows that an attack made in anger, an attack that comes attached with the word _erratic_ , is not going to work. He can’t start with the present. He has to start with the past.

The past doesn’t exist for him. But he knows where he can find it.

* * *

They have a girl stationed at the file room, young and fresh-faced. Probably idealistic. The Winter Soldier has never seen her before. She’ll be low-ranked, trusted to let people in and out of the file room but not trusted to actually read any of the paperwork she safeguards. He wonders if she’s tried anyway. Probably not. They’d kill her for it. She has to know that.

“I need access,” he says as he walks past her desk. She’s reading something on a tablet, and she jumps at the sound of his voice. 

“Could I have your—” She freezes when she looks up at him. Her eyes drop to his arm, then down to the gun still strapped at his waist.

“Recon,” he barks. “Level 89. You can’t have my name.”

Her eyes widen, her eyelashes flutter. “But sir, I can’t just let you—”

“You can let me,” he snarls. “Ask Jarrod Dixon about it.”

Jarrod Dixon. His latest handler. When he comes sniffing around—or rather, when he sends one of his agents to do it for him, he’s scared shitless of the Winter Soldier—the Winter Soldier will say he was looking into the Venerates mission. Just like he’s supposed to. Claim the intel they gave him wasn’t enough to go on, that for Captain America he needs the old stuff from the forties, the paperwork that still hasn’t been uploaded to a computer. The Winter Soldier’s grateful for that, too, since it’s too easy to leave a trace on a computer.

“Yes, okay,” the girl stammers. “But you’ll need to wait outside—”

“No, I don’t.” He slams past her and into the file room. The air there has that feeling about it, like he’s been before even though he can’t remember how or why. A lot of places in this building are like that. It’s something he’s gotten used to.

He can hear the girl outside, talking into her phone, trying to get ahold of Dixon. Even though the Winter Soldier doesn’t think Dixon will be a _real_ problem, he’s not taking any chances. The asshole will probably send one of his bruisers down to check up on him, and the Winter Soldier needs to ensure he’s got the file tucked away before that happens.

Only problem is, he doesn’t know what file he wants. Not exactly.

He can tell from looking at the dates on the shelves that anything close will be in the back. He stalks through the early part of the sixties, the fifties, back into the forties. It’s dark here, a cobweb stretching across a corner of the ceiling. Everything smells like dust. Not familiar. This is not familiar.

He scans the dates quickly. The exhibit at the Smithsonian had said Sergeant Barnes died in January of 1945, although the information card didn’t give the specific cause of death. The general public’s too squeamish for that, he supposes, but it doesn’t help his purposes. He imagines he can find the details out in a public archives, though, if he can’t find it here.

His gaze catches on a span of dates: January to March 1945. The Winter Soldier feels a dull thud in the hollow of his chest. A bump of anxiety. He yanks the shelf out, moving his hand quickly over the file tabs. They’re labeled by date and subject, some asinine filing system that the Winter Soldier is able to decipher in a few seconds. He hears the girl’s voice again, muffled through the doorway but clear to him despite the cavernous space and the impediment of the filing cabinets. 

“He just went right in, Agent Roche. I tried to stop him, but he seemed— _dangerous._ ”

Agent Roche. Dixon was so fucking predictable.

“He is dangerous. You stay here, ma’am.” Agent Roche sounds like he’s trying to impress her. The Winter Soldier keeps scanning the files. It’ll take Agent Roche a few seconds to weave his way through the filing cabinets, and the Winter Soldier has the benefit of superior hearing and speed.

The door clicks open. The Winter Soldier tenses but doesn’t tear his gaze way from the labels. He’s still not sure what he’s looking for—Barnes’ name, Rogers’ name, some intel from the exhibit, some intel that just strikes him hard in the chest. Like Agent Roche’s gun barrel is going to try to do in a few seconds’ time.

“Winter Soldier!” Agent Roche calls out. His voice sounds strange in the confines of the filing room, like he’s not comfortable with all these secrets. “You don’t have authorization to be in here.”

The Winter Soldier is going to have to give up. Try again later. Will he even get in here again later? Dixon’ll pull strings in the background, make it so that Security will call him if the Winter Soldier isn’t exactly where he’s supposed to be. And they’ll probably bolt him with electricity first.

Fuck. _Fuck._ None of this looks right—

And then he sees it. A faded label, bent at the corner. _Subject 38, February 1945._

He doesn’t recognize it, but his chest constricts and there’s that buzzing in his head like he heard at the Smithsonian, and Agent Roche’s heavy, clumsy footsteps are just two filing cabinets over, and the Winter Soldier knows this isn’t a time to think. He snatches the file and shoves into the pocket of his jacket.

“Winter Soldier!” Agent Roche shouts. “I know you’re in here.”

He sounds scared.

Good.

The Winter Soldier shoves the drawer back into place, loud enough to make a sound, and then he bounds over the top of the cabinet and lands softly, cat-like, somewhere in the 1950s. Agent Roche, dutiful to his training, rushes in the direction of the closing file.

“The fuck are you, man?” he shouts. “You know what Dixon’s going to do if you—”

The Winter Soldier creeps around the side of the cabinet. Agent Roche is facing away from him, gun out.

“What’s Dixon going to do?” the Winter Soldier says.

Agent Roche startles, whirls around, points his gun at the Winter Soldier’s heart. The Winter Soldier stares at it dully. The file feels rigid and stiff beneath his jacket, but at least it’s hidden.

“They don’t like you disobeying orders,” Agent Roche says. Doesn’t put his gun down.

“I wasn’t.” The Winter Soldier stares at him, and he can see Agent Roche wavering underneath his gaze. “The intel they gave me for the Venerates mission is no fucking good. Trying to find something on my own.”

Agent Roche blinks. Hesitates. Doesn’t put his gun down.

“Did you find anything here?” he says, after a moment.

“No,” says the Winter Soldier. “But you can tell Dixon if he wants me to complete the mission he better get me something useful.”

Agent Roche doesn’t answer, just lowers his gun. The Winter Soldier pushes past him, moving back through the past and emerging into the sallow fluorescent lights of the present.

* * *

He doesn’t want to arouse Dixon’s suspicions after the run-in with Agent Roche, so he shoves the Subject 38 in the safe in the back of his closet and waits. It’s late afternoon, the autumn sunlight coming in through his window in sharp golden lines. It lights up the motes of dust floating around like snow. Already starting to get cold. They never wake him up in the goddamn summer.

Dixon calls when he expects, an hour or so after he gets back. The intra-office telecomm chimes louder and louder until the Winter Soldier picks it up. 

“Get down here,” Dixon says, his voice distorted with the digitized feedback of the telecomm. “Now.”

“I needed intel for the Venerates mission,” the Winter Soldier says. 

“Get down here.”

Dixon ends the call. The light on the comm slowly dies away. An old technology, left over from the last time they activated him. The Winter Soldier can remember it, or at least fragments of it—the handler giving him intel on a floppy disk, long nights spent stalking the target in some city in Asia. Tokyo, maybe, or Hong Kong. He remembers lights, neon so bright it threatened to drown him.

He thinks back on that mission and nothing happens. There’s no buzzing in his head, no deep-rooted certainty and uncertainty that a part of his own self is missing, that it’s been mutilated by HYDRA.

Not like with the Subject 38 file.

Not like with the blond man on the bridge.

The Winter Soldier doesn’t want to leave the file behind but he also knows he sure as hell can’t take it with him. He double checks the safe, throws some old sparring clothes on top of it. Then he takes the elevator up to Dixon’s office. It’s a private one, just him and his handlers have access, and he knows damn well it’s another way of keeping him under surveillance. He just never cared until now.

Dixon is pounding on his computer keyboard when the Winter Soldier slinks into his office. Agent Amstell is there, assault rifle ready. He sees the Winter Soldier before Dixon does. Kind of shrinks back a little. Coughs. Dixon looks up. 

“Explain yourself,” he says. His voice trembles but he gets that under control quickly enough.

“Told you,” the Winter Soldier says. “Intel for the Venerates mission.”

Dixon considers this. “I gave you all the intel you need. The file was prepared in detail before your activation.”

“The target vanished,” the Winter Soldier says. “After the Helicarrier crash.”

“We know he survived.”

“And he fucking vanished.” The Winter Soldier doesn’t say that he’s the one who made sure the blond man survived; it’s not information Dixon needs to know. “You want me to find him, I need more information than that meaningless bullshit you fed me before Pierce’s termination.”

He almost—almost—stumbles over Pierce’s name, and he doesn’t know why. He hears the buzzing, far off but definitely there.

“And so you went prowling around in the file room? For Christ’s sake, there’s nothing in there. All of that information’s ancient. Useless. I swear to God,” and here Dixon’s voice quiets, as if he’s talking to himself, “I told them this was going to happen. Fry your brain into oblivion.”

The Winter Soldier stiffens. He sees a flash of light burning as bright and hot as the birth of a star. He hears the buzzing hum of electricity. _The electricity_. But they haven’t used it on him since his activation.

Have they?

“I’ll see what I can dig up for you,” Dixon says, turning back to his computer. Agent Amstell tightens the grip on his gun. “But you’re going to want to act fast on this. They aren’t happy.”

“They’re never happy. And that’s why I was in the file room. To _make_ them happy.”

“You’ve established that, thank you.” Dixon starts typing again. He doesn’t look at the Winter Soldier, and the Winter Soldier prefers it that way. His job is easier when people don’t look at him. “I’ll send you what I can find. Until then, you can work off the intel you have.” He pauses, fingers hovering over the keyboard. Still doesn’t look up, still doesn’t make contact. “Track him down. The Venerates mission can’t proceed until he’s dead.”

The Winter Soldier stands up without responding. His acquiescence to Dixon’s orders is implied, and he will keep up that appearance, even if he has no interest in tracking down Captain America. (The blond man on the bridge, the blond man on the riverbed.) He thinks of the file back in his quarters. There will be names inside of it, he’s sure of that. Names he won’t remember, names that will fill him with an indefinable rage.

Those names, he will track.


	4. Steve Rogers

The plane shoots across the darkened sky somewhere over the Arctic Circle. Everything’s quiet, all the passengers curled up beneath their cheap, thin blankets. Sam’s snoring to Steve’s right, earbuds still playing tinny music. Normally Steve can sleep anywhere, nodding off for a few minutes when it’s safe, but for the last forty hours his thoughts have been preoccupied entirely with Bucky. The flight makes it worse. The roar of the engines lulls him into some semi-dream state where he can access memories he’d pressed down because their sweetness is too painful: a kiss that tasted like blood, his lips swollen from the beating the Franzetta brothers had just given him, Bucky pulling him close, arm around his waist, and Steve confused, because he liked girls and he liked this, and he didn’t want it to stop—

A rapid fire burst of Russian crowds into Steve’s thoughts. His eyes fly open. The Russian is followed by manic giggling, a few half-hearted shushes. A pair of flight attendants are getting breakfast ready in the service area. Is it breakfast? Steve’s not sure. He knows he won’t feel like eating regardless.

They’re flying into Moscow because Steve doesn’t know where else to start. The file originates there, in a old KGB stronghold called the Zvezdnyy Building, and Steve figures it’s best if they do this methodically. Start at the beginning, work their way through the back half of the twentieth century. 

Steve settles back into his seat. The flight attendants keep whispering to each other, their voices intercut with laughter, and he wonders what they’re joking about. If Bucky were here, would he tell him? Lean over his shoulder, whisper the translation in his ear? It’s hard to imagine Bucky speaking Russian, but it’s clear from the file that he does, that he can speak Japanese and German and Chinese, too. Steve already knew about the French.

He stays alert during the remainder of the flight. Watches a movie on the screen set into the back of the chair in front of him. Something recent with a pretty girl falling in love with a handsome boy, both of them making jokes all the way through.. Watching it, Steve feels an immeasurable sadness.

Sam wakes up; the flight attendants serve the meal. A roast beef sandwich, chicken soup. It must be lunch time in Moscow.

The plane lands a few hours later, and Steve and Sam go through the disembarkation process largely in silence. Steve is still thinking about Bucky--the Bucky of the present this time, the Winter Soldier--and Sam looks bleary-eyed and sleepy.

“I hate flying,” he grumbles as they wait for their bags to drop out onto the baggage carousel.

“Surprise to me,” Steve says, and grins at him. Putting on a cheerful face. He doesn’t want to Sam to know just how hard it’s been to get Bucky out of his head.

Sam rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I meant flying like that. Crammed into a sardine can, that little ding whenever the captain turns on the seatbelt sign.” Sam looks over at Steve. “And is it just me, or does every single pilot sound like he’s on quaaludes when he makes his announcements? Russian, American, doesn’t matter.  I’m like, spit it out, man.”

Steve smiles. “Didn’t notice.”

“Yeah, well.” Sam turns back to the carousel. “I’m just saying, my way’s better.”

“Your way couldn’t get us to Russia.”

“Too bad. Oh, hey, is that your bag?”

It is Steve’s bag, the military-issue backpack he’s used on every mission since he woke up. Steve heaves it off the carousel. A few minutes later, Sam’s bag appears, and they leave the airport together. The air outside already has the frosted edge of winter, and the sky is a heavy, leaden gray. There’s already a few patches of dirty snow on the ground.

“Hell of a time to come to Moscow,” Sam says. “Right at the start of winter.”

“We won’t be here long,” Steve says. He hopes.

Without the benefit of SHEILD assistance, Steve and Sam have to check into a civilian hotel. They use a couple of false names, pretend they’re just tourists from Texas, here to see the snow. It’s a nice enough place, a decent-sized room with a couple of twin beds, a window that looks out over Red Square. Steve unpacks his computer and the physical file and sets them up at the table beside the window. He doesn’t move to open either of them.

“Hey.” Sam’s voice is soft, concerned. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.” But then Steve shakes his head. “No, I’m not actually. I’m—I’m not sure what I’m feeling.”

Sam walks over beside him and for a moment they stand there facing the window. Sam’s good about that. If you want to talk, he’ll listen. If you don’t want to talk, well, he’ll respect that, too.

“I don’t know what we’re going to find,” Steve finally says. “And that’s—that’s got me nervous.”

Sam nods. “I can understand that.”

“I think, maybe we’ll find him, it’ll be that easy.” Steve shrugs. “I know it won’t, but I keep hoping, you know?”

“Yeah.” Sam presses one hand against the window and leans forward, peering out at the city. “And I hope you know that whether it’s easy or not, I’m gonna help you.” He glances at Steve over his shoulder. “You do know that, right?”

Steve grins. “I do, yeah. That’s not what I’m worried about.” He sighs and sits in his chair. “Seventy years,” he says. “It’s dumb for me to so impatient.”

“I don’t think so.” Sam turns and leans up against the window, arms crossed over his chest, head tilted to the side. “You’re one hell of a friend, you know that?”

Steve laughs, a bittersweet ache lingering in his chest.

“I’m serious, man. One of my buddies tried to kill me—twice—I’m not sure I could do what you’re doing.” Sam jerks his chin toward the view of the city. “You flew halfway across the world to find him. That’s impressive.”

“You say that,” Steve says. “But I think you would too. Go out and save one of your friends.” He doesn’t mention that his loyalty to Bucky moves beyond friendship, into a realm undefinable in the forties and only just starting to make sense to Steve in 2014. Here they at least have a word for it.

Sam shrugs. “Maybe. All I’m saying is that just flying out here, you’ve probably done more for him than anyone else has done in years. Don’t forget that.”

Steve blinks. He wonders if that’s true, or if maybe someone else loved Bucky at some point during those seventy years. He’s surprised when the thought doesn’t make him jealous. Rather, he’s comforted by the idea that Bucky might had a few moments of happiness somewhere in the dark mystery of his past. Steve had it with Peggy, didn’t he? Even if he doesn’t have it anymore.

“You can’t keep beating yourself up over this,” Sam says, and Steve nods, staring out the window at the cold city.

* * *

The translated files on Steve’s computer tell him that _zvezdnyy_ means means _starlight_ , but the drive to the Zvezdnyy Building takes them through a neighborhood of dank alleys and scraggly, starved-looking trees. There is nothing about this place that suggest starlight.

They’re in a rented car, old and nondescript, the engine rumbling hoarsely beneath the hood. Steve has his shield, and they were able to get a couple of guns from a nameless man working out of the back of a pastry shop, plus ammunition. Nothing more than that, though, and after a year of working with SHIELD, Steve feels unarmed. 

“Turn left,” Steve says, glancing down at the GPS on his phone. “We should be coming up on it.”

Sam slows as he turns. He peers over the top of the steering wheel. Steve looks out the passenger window. The street is abandoned. The storefronts are broken and graffiti’d, and snow has piled up on the sidewalk, uncleared. 

“I think we’re gonna get lucky,” Steve says. “It looks like no one’s been down to this entire area in years.”

“Still rather play it safe,” Sam says. He squints out the windshield. “You think that’s it up there?”

Steve follow his gaze. “Maybe.” The Zvezdnyy Building is supposed to be a compound, from what Steve could tell from the file, and that’s what this looks like. A thick gray wall rises out of the cement, dying vines curling over it in rattling swirls. The road dead-ends into a metal gate, and Steve can just make out the top of buildings over the fence.

Something moves beyond the gate.

“Stop,” Steve says, but Sam has already hit the brakes, slowly enough that the car won’t, hopefully, draw attention.

“You saw it, too,” Sam says in a low voice.

“I’m not sure it’s abandoned.”

Sam doesn’t answer except to ease the car forward a few feet. Another flash of movement beyond the gate. A face looms out of the shadow. Something glints in the pale sunlight.

“He’s armed. Get us out of here,” Steve says.

“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Sam pulls the car around in a three-point turn and directs them back the way they came. Steve glances over his shoulder. The Zvezdnyy Building retreats into the distance, and the man with the gun steps out from behind the gate and watches their car leave.

“I’ll have to break in,” Steve says. 

“What’s this _I_ shit?” Sam picks up speed. “You know I’m going in there with you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t.” Sam pulls the car up to the curb and turns off the engine. He looks over at Steve. “How do you want to do this?”

“We have no idea what we’re getting into,” Steve says. He doesn’t like this, going in without a plan, without a mission beyond _find Bucky_. 

“I noticed.”  Sam reaches into the backset and grabs one of the pistols. “But I don’t see how we’ve got much of a choice, do you? We couldn’t find anything out about this place back in the States.”

“I remember.” As far as Steve has learned, the Zvezdnyy Building fell into disrepair at the end of the Cold War. There shouldn’t be men with guns guarding the gate.

“Let’s do this,” Sam says, and he climbs out of the car.

Steve grabs the other gun and his shield and follows. The wind is colder than it was when they left the hotel, a sharp, insisting lashing he feels through his thin coat. He pulls back the hammer on his gun and holds it out, low ready. Sam nods at him.

They move.

Despite having no plan, no intel, and no knowledge of this place, they manage to skitter through the empty streets without trouble. When the Zvezdnyy Building’s wall comes into view, they duck into a nearby alley. Steve’s heart thuds hard against his chest. He’s more nervous than he normally is before a mission. It’s only partially because of the uncertainty of breaking into the compound.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to find in there. About Bucky.

Steve peers around the corner of the alley, scans the top of the wall. He doesn’t see anything but that guard at the gate. The guard’s more alert than he was when they drove by, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk with his gun. But he’s alone.

Steve nods once at Sam. They slip out of the alley, bodies crouched low, feet whispering against the sidewalk. The guard picks his head up, turns their direction, and releases a round of bullets. Sam hits the ground but Steve flings out his his shield. The guard cries out and collapses to the ground. A cloud of black birds erupts off of a nearby roof, looking like static against the sky. The echo of the gunshots reverberates through the still streets as the shield ricochets back around to Steve’s grasp.

Silence.

“Go,” Steve whispers, and they race forward toward the gate. Sam grabs the guard’s assault rifle and slings it over his shoulder, checks the perimeter. Steve kneels beside the guard. His pulse is steady, but he’s unmoving. Good.  A keyring dangles from his belt, and Steve grabs it and tries each key in the lock until the gate pops open. He steps in first, gun out. It’s a courtyard, dead trees growing out of cobblestone. Empty. Steve knows it won’t be for long.

“There,” he says to Sam, pointing at a carved wooden door across the courtyard. “I’ll try the keys. You cover for me if I need it.”

Sam nods, and Steve takes off across the courtyard, shield up over his head. He has just run past the first of the trees when the bullets starts, streaks of heat and light he feels rather than sees. Shooting from the front of him, from the windows in the building; shooting from behind him, from Sam. Someone screams. A man in the building. Not Sam.

Steve slams up against the door and jams the key into the lock. Doesn’t work. Tries another. Someone shouts in Russian. The bullets stop and Steve knows that means they’re amassing for something worse. Tries a third key. Third time’s a charm. The door opens.

“Sam!” Steve shouts across the courtyard.

“On my way, Cap.”

Steve wants to tell Sam that he’s not Captain America right now, that he’s not sure he’s going to ever be Captain America again, but instead he slams in through the door and faces a trio of guards who open fire immediately. He throws up his shield and the impact of the bullets runs down his arm and then he jumps, kicks the middle one in the face, knocks the other two off to the side. They slam against the wall, slide down the floor. Out cold.

Steve picks up one of their guns and tosses one to Sam, who catches it, shoves into the waistband of his pants. They move forward through the hallway. It looks the way Steve would imagine an abandoned KGB building to look, the walls water-stained and rotting, the floor covered with a layer of dust. Except that dust has been tracked through with footprints, and no one hires guards for an abandoned building.

“What do you think’s going on here?” Sam whispers to Steve. “HYDRA?”

“Maybe.” They come to a doorway; Steve kicks the door in, swings his gun around. The room’s empty. A metal desk is shoved up against the far wall; a broken window lets in streams of gray sunlight. “I don’t know.”

Footsteps echo overhead; more shouting in Russian. Steve has never wished he’d been stationed on the Russian front more than he does right now. 

The hallway dead-ends into a stairwell. Steve knows damn well they’re going to find guards waiting for them at the top, and he can only hope, only _pray_ , that beyond those guards he’ll find something that was worth all this fighting.

Sam glances over at him. “You ready?”

Steve nods.

The minute their feet touch the first stair step, the stairwell explodes. Steve deflects the shots with his shield and Sam fires upward around the bend in the stairs and they both run, heads down. Steve isn’t thinking, just fighting, just surviving. His ears ring from the gun blasts and when Sam shouts his name it sounds far away.

“Look out!” 

A hulking, dark figure slams toward Steve and for half a second he thinks it’s Bucky. The the figure’s foot connects with his shield and Steve shoves him back and he hits against the wall. No metal arm. Short hair. It’s not Bucky.

More guards are waiting at the top of the stairs. Their guns look like fireworks. What a stupid thing to think, but Steve thinks it anyway, dazed from seeing Bucky in the silhouette of his attacker. Fireworks like that Fourth of July in ’39, when Bucky snaked his arm over Steve’s shoulder, kissed him hard on the mouth in the summer swelter—

_No_.

Steve hurls his shield at the guards and it slams across their midsections, toppling them over. Steve and Sam jump over their unconscious bodies and move forward. Their uniforms have the HYDRA logo, skull and tentacles. He knows that Sam sees it, too, and they exchange quick nods.

Every part of Steve is tense with battle anxiety, his skin crawling with the anticipation for whatever’s going to come at them next. But nothing does.

This hallway doesn’t have the abandoned air of the first floor hallway. The walls are clean, freshly painted over, and the halogen bulbs in the fixtures cast everything with a unearthly golden glow. The doors are neatly labeled in Cyrillic characters. Steve tries the closest one. Locked. And the guard’s key ring doesn’t open it.

“Shit,” Steve says beneath his breath. He tries the next door. Same thing.

And then, behind him, he hears the squeak of rubber against hardwood.

Steve whirls around, shield and gun up. Sam’s already there. Both of them stare down at a woman in a white lab coat, her hair piled messily on top of her head. She lifts her hands over head, says something in Russian. 

She sounds afraid.

“Do you speak English?” Steve says. “Ou en français?”

She nods. “Some English.” She takes a tottering step backwards, bumps up against the doorframe. The door’s open. Steve peers past her. Inside is dark, underlit with a pale blue light. 

“What do you know about the Winter Soldier project?” he says.

The woman’s eyes widen. She turns and dives toward the open door, but Steve is fast enough to jump in front of her. He looks into the room. It’s small, the light emanating from a computer sitting at its center. He turns back to the woman.

“What do you know?” he says.

She presses up against the door, still scared.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Steve says. He gestures at Sam. “Either of us. We’re just trying to track down the Winter Soldier.”

“You can’t,” the woman says.

“Do you know where he is?” Sam says.

She shakes her head. “I’m not—I’m not sure of the English?—not authorized. I know of the project and its history, but only academically.”

Steve stares at her. He’s not going to walk away from here with nothing. 

“What do you do here?” he says.

The woman looks at the barrel of his gun. “They’ll kill me if I say. They might kill me anyway.”

“We can get you to a safehouse,” he says.

“No, you can’t.” She lifts her eyes to his face. They are very dark, almost black. “You have no backing anymore, Captain America.”

Steve doesn’t say anything.

“You have no access to safe houses.”

“We’re not going to let them kill you,” Sam says. 

“Hmm.” She slumps against the wall, drops her head to the side.

“Steve, talk a look around,” Sam says. “I’ll watch the door. Maybe you can find something.”

The woman looks at him. “You won’t find anything in English.”

Steve ignores her, moves into the room. It’s stuffy. Hot. There’s a space heater in the corner, that must be why. He goes over to the computer, hits the space bar. Everything’s in Russian. He wishes Natasha were here with him. He clicks on an icon, opens it up. The screen fills with Cyrillic characters. He closes out. Clicks another icon.

Bucky.

The air slams out of Steve as if he’s been punched. It’s Bucky, Bucky’s picture, and pages of text, and a map. A _map_. 

He whirls around, points his gun at the woman’s heart. “You lied,” he said. “You know where he is. He’s right here.” He jabs his finger at the computer. “Academically, my ass.”

The woman doesn’t say anything, just stares at the gun. 

“Where is he?” 

“I don’t know,” she says, her voice flat. “I didn’t lie to you. I’m only studying him. To replicate the project.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “That, they’ll kill me for that.”

“I won’t let them.” Steve lowers her gun and steps toward her. “Just tell me where he is.”

She lifts her gaze again, and her eyes shimmer and a tear drops down over one cheek. Sam looks over at him, frowning.

“Just wait,” she says. “Wherever you are, there he’ll be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is turning out to be much more of a slow burn than I expected. Ah well! 
> 
>  
> 
> As always, thanks for the kudos and support so far. I really appreciate it :)


	5. The Winter Soldier

He waits until the clock rolls over to oh three hundred before he leaves his living quarters with the Subject 38 file tucked inside his jacket. This time of night has always suited him—its hush, its stillness. You can hear a hostile’s footsteps like a gunshot, and a target never even knows that he should be listening.

There’s an old safehouse on the edge of the city, or at least there used to be. The Winter Soldier remembers holing up there when a tropical storm blew in during a mission. He waited out the storm with a flashlight and a package of HYDRA-issued survival rations. No handler, no way of contacting Headquarters, nothing but a cheap electronic store radio giving scratchy updates. He’d shot holes in the wall with his rifle, trying to alleviate his boredom while the storm raged on outside.

The Winter Soldier takes a cab out to the safehouse. He covers his face with a scarf, but the driver doesn’t look at him so it doesn’t matter. The safehouse is still standing. Still empty, too, without any of the signs of domestication, although the yard is neatly mown. After the cab has pulled away, its headlights retracting into the darkness, the Winter Soldier kicks at the tiles on the porch. One comes loose easily. He flips it over with his foot. The HYDRA safehouse logo is still there, and gone over with a fresh coat of paint besides. That’s a bit worrying--but he’s got his pistol and his best knives. He can ensure that no HYDRA agents join him here.

He picks the lock, goes inside, flips on the light. The place is mostly empty, just a shabby couch in the living room, an old TV, a card table surrounded by plastic lawn chairs. The Winter Soldier sits down at the table and takes out the file.

Subject 38.

He’s struck with that buzzing again. His vision swims. And he hears a voice speaking Russian: “Subject 38 is waking.”

The Winter Soldier closes his eyes and focuses on the sounds of the house, the sounds which a civilian would call silence but which the Winter Soldier knows is really a symphony--the creaks of the foundation, the scratching of some animal up in the attic, the distant hum of the power lines.

And slowly, slowly, the buzzing subsides. So does the Russian voice. It grows softer and softer until the Winter Soldier can’t even recreate it in his own thoughts. Gone, it’s all gone. The Winter Soldier opens his eyes again and looks down at the file. Subject 38. He grinds his jaw, forcing himself to stay in the present.

It works.

He flips the file open and with a jolt sees his own face. It’s the soldier again. Sergeant Barnes. The Winter Soldier yanks the picture out of the file and turns it facedown on the table. He doesn’t need this ghost of himself staring at him out of a photograph.

The file is slim, the papers old and yellowed. The text is in German but the Winter Soldier is able to decipher the gist of it. Sergeant Barnes was recovered in the bottom of a ravine. Frozen, missing an arm, alive. The serum had protected him. The Winter Soldier reads all this and feels an empty detachment to it. He understands, vaguely, that this is the report of how he came to be. He’s never spent much time thinking about his metal arm, at least not any more than he thinks about his other arm. It’s just a part of him. The scars, they’re a part of him, too. He knew it had to come from somewhere, that there had to be some reason—but he’s never thought to ask.

Has he?

The Winter Soldier frowns, scans over the rest of the report. There are notes about how the “mechanical enhancements” failed, how they don’t want to waste their work and so he will have to go into containment. The freezer. The first time they froze him was in 1945.

He shoves the file away and stares into the empty space above the table. There was an American soldier named James Barnes, and he died and was reborn in the snow as the Winter Soldier. 

Bucky. His name was Bucky Barnes.

The Winter Soldier doesn’t feel as if any of this has happened to him. And yet he knows that it’s true, the way he knows that the cab drive to the safehouse is true. It’s a fragment of the past. It happened.

He looks down at the file again. There are no names listed in the report, only codes that are meaningless to him. He flips through the pages, reading much more closely, trying to find something to explain the rage he felt in the exhibit hall. It doesn’t bother him that HYDRA agents found him and tried to give him a new arm. He appreciates his arm. The arm is not the problem.

He turns to the last page of the file, and he catches on a note scrawled at the bottom in blue ink. It’s faded almost to invisibility, and even with his enhanced vision he has to hold it into the light to really make it out. 

_Program reactivated in April ’53. Mechanical enhancement a success, but Winter Soldier shows signs of memory recovery—detrimental to our plan. Rehabilitation research currently under development by Dr. Komissarov._

The words are an explosion. They are as bright as the sun and they tear straight through the Winter Soldier’s thoughts. Rehabilitation. Dr. Komissarov.

And he remembers.

He remembers the bright, closed-in room, remembers the table with the metal restraints. A man, a doctor, leaning over him, speaking Russian—Russian he can’t understand, the words blurring together. A knife glinting to the side. A knife cutting into him at the temple. Pain, searing blinding pain.

_We are going to make you into the man we want you to be, Subject 38_.

It’s the voice from before, the one he heard when he looked at the file. He recognized it, just for a moment—

And then he remembers fighting, bare-handed, killing one man after another while shadow-faced men watched nearby, taking notes on clipboards. He remembers he hated it, the killing. It felt pointless and cruel (and exhilarating, it felt exhilarating and he hated that he felt that too, thought it made him a monster). And afterwards they took him into the bright room, they cut into him again, and the doctor spoke to him in Russian, and when he’d sink back out of the darkness everything would be hazy and the doctor would send electricity running up his spine and he would scream and fight back but he was restrained, he was not a danger to them. To him. To that doctor.

Dr. Komissarov.

The buzzing starts again. It’s so loud that the Winter Soldier thinks that it can’t possibly be coming from his own head, that it must be the electricity here, in the safehouse. He screams and jumps away from the table, flipping it up against the wall, where it gauges a hole into the drywall. The file’s papers flap like birds. Dr. Komissarov. He was a tall man, and thin, with a dark beard tracing over his cheekbones. He smiled as he worked, like a doctor in a hospital tending to a sick patient. And he was young. 

He could still be alive.

A name. The Winter Soldier has a name.

He collapses on the floor beside the couch, hands draped over his knees, hair hanging in his face, chest heaving. The buzzing is still there, echoing around inside his head. Dr. Komissarov is still there. He’s speaking Russian and the Winter Soldier reminds himself that he speaks Russian now even if he didn’t then. He knows what Dr. Komissarov is saying.

_“You’re to be a weapon, Subject 38. A weapon for HYDRA—”_  

Yes. A weapon. He’s a weapon.

And he’ll show Dr. Komissarov just how strong a weapon he has become.

* * *

The telecomm’s chime wakes the Winter Soldier the next morning. He managed to snatch an hour or so of sleep after he returned from the safehouse, but he’s never needed much sleep, and he’s alert the moment the chime goes off, that steady outdated beeping intruding on dreams he can’t remember.

“Yeah?” he says, rolling over onto his side to answer.

“Got the intel you wanted,” Dixon says. “Get ready. You’re flying out to Moscow.”

A shudder of panic cuts through the Winter Soldier’s system. They know. The safehouse was tapped, they saw him last night—this is some kind of trap.

“Moscow?” he asks, keeping his voice casual. “The hell is Steve Rogers doing in Moscow?” He listens carefully, not just to Dixon’s answer but to the empty space that precedes it. The Winter Soldier knows the danger in ignoring the vacuum.

But Dixon doesn’t hesitate. “I have no fucking idea,” he says. “But he broke into the Zvezdnyy Building yesterday afternoon. One of the researchers is missing—they’re going to want you to uncover her, too, in case she spilled. I’ll debrief you on the details on the ride over. Meet up at the launch pad in ten minutes. We’re taking the Grayhawk over. Three hour flight.”

The telecomm goes silent. The Winter Soldier stares down at it, heart thudding hard against his sternum. He found Komissarov’s name last night, and this morning he gets a mission that takes him straight into Russia. A coincidence.

The Winter Soldier has engineered enough coincidences in his lifetime to know not to trust them. Ever.

Still, if Dixon is up to something, the Winter Soldier know that he’s got to let him think he has the upper hand. So he suits up, grabs the knives and smaller weapons he keeps in his living quarters—the weapons he’s _allowed_ to keep in his living quarters, although of course no one, not even Dixon at his most manipulative, has ever put it that way—and takes the elevator all the way up to the roof of the building. The Grayhawk is waiting, engines roaring with the blue-black light of whatever power sources lets the plane glide through the air without alerting the good citizens of Earth down below.  A couple of agents are guarding the entrance to the Grayhawk, and they nod at the Winter Soldier as he passes, eyes averted.

Dixon’s already on board, along with Agent Roche, who gives him a dark look. The door hisses shut behind him. The engines hum.

“You’ll want to sit down for take off,” Dixon says without looking up from his tablet.

The Winter Soldier does as he’s told. He can’t remember if he’s been on the Grayhawk before. He thinks he has. It’s familiar, and he knows what it is, what does. But he doesn’t have a solid memory of flying on one. It doesn’t feel terribly important, either way.

There’s no _buzzing_.

The Grayhawk shoots off with a super-sonic blast that rattles the teeth in the Winter Soldier’s jaw. Dixon activates the big holographic computer display, transparent files and pictures scattering in the space above the seats. “This is what we have so far,” he says. “We’ll be dropping you in Moscow. Track Rogers, find the researcher.” He taps on his tablet and a woman’s ID portrait swallows up all the rest of the information. She stares out at the Winter Soldier with dark, doleful eyes. “Dr. Ana Ananyeva. She was working in the facility when it was infiltrated. Missing now, as I said—”

Dixon drones on. It’s the usual shit, and the Winter Soldier has already been debriefed, several times, on the importance of eliminating Steve Rogers before the rest of the Avengers are tended to. They never explained why, but the Winter Soldier has his theories. 

They don’t want him remembering Steve Rogers. He’s been keeping it to himself that he does, and he can’t say why, only that he knows if he doesn’t, they’ll use the electricity.

The stuff with Ananyeva is new, but the Winter Soldier has silenced talky agents before. Dixon’s leaving him in the city and holing up at a safehouse in the countryside—typical procedure. Let him work on his own, let him be the go-between between HYDRA and HYDRA’s enemies. The Winter Soldier has no complaints on this front. It makes his real goal, his real mission, that much easier.

Assuming, of course, that Komissarov is still alive and still living in Russia. But he’s got ties to the KGB, which means he’s got to ties to the Zvezdnyy Building, however ancient and falling apart those ties might be. The Winter Soldier will find him. Maybe he’ll find Steve Rogers, too.

And then what? Kill him? The Winter Soldier looks over at Dixon, his face stained with light from the computer display. Still talking. Agent Roche squints at the file, hands tight around his gun.

The Winter Soldier understands then that he will both of them before he kills Steve Rogers.

* * *

The Zvezdnyy Building is too strategic a location to clear out completely, even after the raid, but the files have all been locked down behind an extra two layers of security. The new files, at any rate. The older ones—well, the Winter Soldier’s got a high clearance when he’s activated. Particularly, it seems, here in Russia.

They’re all digital files, unfortunately, but the Winter Soldier is too determined to find out about Komissarov to worry about his trace. Being in the Zvezdnyy Building is making his head roar. The lights are too bright and the shadows too dark and he knows the place is a secret to finding himself. He hunches over the computer keyboard, fingers clumsy in his gloves. _Roman Komissarov_ , he types, and the entire file blossoms onto the screen. 

There’s no death date. The Winter Soldier grins.

Birthdate, places lived, education, involvement in the war, placement in the KGB, in HYDRA—on and on it goes, and with each line the Winter Soldier reads the more quickly his heart beats, the more strongly he can feel the bloodlust rising up in him. Komissarov retired in the ‘90s. He still lives in Moscow.

He still lives in Moscow.

The Winter Soldier reads the address. Memorizes it. He doesn’t even give a damn that it’s too much of a coincidence. The Zvezdnyy Building makes him feel hollow and pulled apart, and the only thing that’s going to make him whole again is to watch Komissarov bleed.

He’s about close the file when his eye catches a link near the bottom.

_Winter Soldier Project_.

The Winter Soldier stares at it, disconcerted by the sight of his own name in print. He feels an actual attachment to it, unlike the _James “Bucky” Barnes_ that was plastered all over the Smithsonian exhibit, and the idea that it was also the name of a _project_ , that he himself is a project in every way—

He hates it.

All the Winter Soldier has done is sit in front of this computer and defy Dixon’s orders, but he feels like he’s gone five rounds with an entire army. He’s shaking when he clicks on the link. He doesn’t know what to expect: his picture, a report like in the Subject 38 file. But it’s just a list of names.

Stanislav Golov.

Yuri Lukin.

Boris Maslak.

Alois Hafner.

The buzzing slams into the Winter Soldier’s thoughts. Everything in the room falls away: the dirty brick, the broken filing cabinet in the corner, the grime on the windows. There is only that list of names, the blood pounding in the Winter Soldier’s ears, and a taste like metal at the back of his throat. Metal, like a gun, like the knives he will use to cut the throat of every single name on this list.

Because these are the names. He is certain of that. And as he sits in that rickety chair, reading them over and over, the memories begin. They are old, as old as dust. As old as the Zvezdnyy Building.

Waking up shivering in a room filled with steam.

Men in white coats leaning over him, speaking Russian, English, German. 

A searing pain in his left arm.

A searing pain in his head.

They are inside his head, these men, scooping it clean, replacing it with their own desires.

One of them— _Maslak, it’s Maslak—_ punches him hard in the face when he’s strapped down. He rages but can not fight back.

Another— _Hafner or Lukin, they took turns, he remembers this_ —hold him down under freezing water. He thrashes against them. They’re punishing him, beating him across the back. He remembers. He spoke back, questioned his superior officer. Commander Zola. He had asked why.

_Why do you want me to kill this man? The hell as he done?_

He was going to do it anyway. He _liked_ doing it. (Likes doing it.) But he’d only wanted to know why.

And for that, they almost drowned him. For that they beat him and electrified him. And he didn’t ask why anymore.

The Winter Soldier shoves away from the computer. The chair topples over, spinning and skittering across the floor before falling into silence. The Winter Soldier sucks in deep breaths of air. It’s the only sound in the room. He can’t even hear the sounds of the building. Only himself, struggling to breathe.

The names glow in the dusty dimness.

Stanislav Golov.

Yuri Lukin.

Boris Maslak.

Alois Hafner.

Roman Komissarov.

The Winter Soldier knows that this time when he disobeys, he will not be punished.

This time, there will be no one left to punish him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay in updating this! Real life was a-calling. Fortunately, I should be on a regular update schedule from here on out.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Steve Rogers

“We need to get out of Russia.”

They’re careening away from the Zvezdnyy Building. Sam has both hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, and he keeps his eyes on the road. Steady, careful. Steve looks back at the woman in the backseat. The scientist. She said her name is Ana; that’s all she’ll tell them.

“I came here to find Buck—the Winter Soldier,” he says. “If he thinks I’m in Russia, I’m staying in Russia.”

Ana narrows her eyes at him. “He’s coming to _kill_ you. And kill me. So if you want to stay in Russia, fine. Die if that’s what you want. But I can’t stay here.”

“She’s right.”

Steve turns toward Sam, who’s still staring out at the street.

“It’s too dangerous,” Sam says. “You wanted to find him on your terms, right? Approach _him_. If he comes after you, he’s gonna be looking for a fight. We need to be smart about this.”

Steve looks at Sam and then back at Ana and then back out at the gray, icy street. He feels hollow from the fighting. His clothes are stiff with dried sweat, there’s a faint ache in his side that’ll heal soon enough but for right now is a reminder of what happened, and his ears are still buzzing.  He saw Bucky’s face on that computer screen. Long-haired and hard-eyed but still _Bucky,_ his Bucky. It’s just the shell that’s changed. Not the man.

Steve tells himself that, over and over. _Not the man. Not the man_. Bucky won’t kill him. He hasn’t yet. Not even on the Helicarrier, screaming that he didn’t know Steve—Steve let himself die. Bucky didn’t _kill_ him. 

“We’ll get you taken care of,” Steve says, twisting around to look at Ana. She sinks into the back seat as if she could fade away into non-existence, as if that would protect her. “I may not have SHIELD anymore but I’ve still got some tricks up my sleeve.” He gives her a grin which he doesn’t feel and which she doesn’t return.

“What tricks are those?” Sam mutters to him when he turns back around.

“You’ve met her,” Steve says.

Sam nods. Frowns. They’re back in the populated portion of the city again. People dot along the sidewalks. It makes Steve feel marginally safer, even though the first time Bucky—the Winter Soldier—attacked him, it was on a freeway, cars and civilians everywhere.

They arrive back at the hotel. Steve moves to help Ana out of the car but she climbs out before he can, standing there on the street with her arms wrapped around her chest. She tilts her head back and looks up at the hotel.

“Some safehouse,” she says.

“Trust me,” Steve says. “We’ll have you out of harm’s way soon.”

She gives him a dark look that says she doesn’t believe him.

All three of them know they shouldn’t be out on the street, and they file into the hotel, one after another. Steve stays on high alert, and he can tell Sam is doing the same, sweeping his gaze back and forth across the lobby. 

They ride the elevator together up to the room. No one gets on with them, and Steve’s relieved for that. Strangers mean the possibility of a fight, and he doesn’t think he’s up for another one. Not physically—physically, he can fight for hours. But emotionally, that’s the problem.

Still, Steve does make a quick sweep of their room while Sam waits with Ana out in the hall. Everything’s clear. Everything’s safe. (For now.) Steve gestures at Sam to bring in Ana. She looks around the room warily. She looks tired and older than she did back at the compound. When she sits down at the chair beside the window, she does so with a sigh that seems to deflate her completely.

“Can I get you anything?” Steve asks. “A glass of water?”

“A glass of vodka would be better.” 

Steve frowns, unsure of how to fulfill her request, but Sam has already picked up the phone and dialed down to room service. “Any way we can get a bottle of vodka up here?” he says, and then pauses, listening, a voice fluttering on the other end of the line. Ana watches him. She looks like she might laugh, but Steve wouldn’t exactly call it an an expression of delight.

Sam hangs up the phone. “Cheaper than I thought,” he says. “Your vodka’s on the way up.”

“Thank you.” Ana folds her hands in her lap. 

They sit in silence for a few moments. Steve wonders if it’s a good idea for her to drink right now. But then, he never really understood alcohol before the serum—too many bad associations—and now it doesn’t even affect him. But Sam seems to understand why she’d want a drink. It’s just another thing that builds a wall up around Steve, separating him out from the rest of the world. He wonders if Bucky can get drunk now. If that’s something they could share.

The thought pains him. It’s so ordinary.

“So what about this help you promised me?” Ana says. 

Her voice is sharp-edged and accusatory and it jars Steve out of his reverie. “Right,” Steve says. “I’ll need to contact her. She’ll get you squared away, no problem.”

“And in exchange?” she says. “What do you want from me? A quick tumble for you and your friend before you call your _contact?_ ”

“No!” Steve says, horrified. 

Ana looks like she doesn’t believe him.

“This isn’t HYDRA,” Sam says. “We don’t work that way.”

“Oh, it’s not just HYDRA that works that way,” Ana says.

“Well, we don’t,” Steve says. “All we want is information. Anything you can give us about the Winter Soldier program.”

Ana looks at him, eye glittering fiercely. “I’m going to need that vodka before I start betraying my employers. I’m sure you’ll understand.” 

Steve rubs his forehead. He knows it’s not fair for him to be so impatient, but he feels like he breathed in a piece of Bucky’s history in the Zvezdnyy Building, like if he just breathes deeper the path to Bucky will light up and he’ll find him, he’ll be able to pull him back from the darkness. 

“Call Natasha,” Sam says. He claps one hand on Steve’s shoulder and Steve jumps; he hadn’t even noticed Sam walking across the room. Ana stares at them both reproachfully. “Get that set up. I’ll watch her.” He jerks his head toward Ana.

“Right,” Steve says. “Will do.” He tries to be cheerful and reassuring, even if he doesn’t feel it. He stands up, grabs his cell phone off the nearby table. He has no idea where Natasha is, but before she left she gave him a number—“Text _morning glory_ if you need anything,” she said. “I’ll get back to you. Promise.” And she smiled and for a half a second Steve felt like he really knew her.

He taps in the number and then types _morning glory_ and hits send. The room buzzes with silence as he watches the word _sending…_ blink over and over on his screen.

Then: _Sent_.

He looks up. Sam and Ana are staring at him.

“That’s it?” she says. “That’s your big secret contact? You just text them?”

Someone knocks at the door. Ana jumps. Sam pulls his pistol out of his jacket and moves to the door. Steve holds up his shield. Ana pulls her knees to her chest.

Sam peers through the peep hole. His shoulders relax and he shoves the gun into the waistband of his pants. He opens the door and it’s just what you’d expect, a boy in a waiter’s coat carrying a bottle of vodka and a couple of glasses.

He squeaks something in Russian. Then: “Room service?”

“Oh, hey, thanks man.” Sam takes the vodka and glasses and hands them over to Steve, then fumbles around in his wallet for a tip. Steve’s phone chirps on the table. He glances at it. A text, sender unknown. Nothing in it but a string of numbers.

“Here,” Steve says, handing the vodka over to Ana. He grabs his phone and scurries into the bathroom. It’s the only place he figures he can get any real privacy, which seems like something Natasha would want, or, at the very least, do herself. He peers down at the numbers. One’s got ten digits—a phone number. The other’s got seven. He dials the phone number. It rings twice, then a mechanized female voice says, “Enter code.”

He taps in the seven digit number. Immediately, there’s a grinding, whirring sound that reminds him, weirdly, of the phones he used to know back during his childhood, those mechanical wonders that required an actual person to connect the wires.

The phone clicks. “Steve?”

It’s a relief to hear Natasha’s voice. Steve leans up against the counter. “Tasha,” he says. “How are you?”

“Is this just a social call? Because we won’t need the secure line for that, you know.” She sounds either annoyed or amused—sometimes it’s hard to tell with her. Either way, she seems to think he might have actually done that, texted the code just to say hi. 

“Afraid not,” he says. “I need your help with something.”

There’s a pause on the other end. He thinks he can hear her breathing. “Did you find him?” she says carefully.

“Not yet.” Steve glances at the closed bathroom door. He can hear Sam’s voice out in the room, low, soothing. “But we found a girl.”

“Well! How about that. You take her out for ice cream yet?”

“No, geeze—ice cream?” Steve shakes his head. “It’s not like that. She’s a scientist—a researcher for HYDRA.” And he tells her the rest of the story in a rushed voice. The Zvezdnyy Building, the file with Bucky’s picture—everything.

“And we need you to secure her,” he says. “She’s not willing to give us the intel unless she knows she’s safe. HYDRA will kill her otherwise.”

“And you thought I could help?”

“Can you?”

She laughs. “Depends on what you need. I’m not going to babysit her.”

“I don’t expect you to,” he says. “Just—get her into hiding. I know there have to be former SHIELD agents out there who can help somehow—”

“There are.” Natasha sighs. “Give me a day. You sure you want to stay in Moscow?”

“Yes,” Steve says, without hesitation. “But I can send her to another rendezvous point with Sam. I know HYDRA’s going to be on us soon, but that’s—that’s what I want.”

“You be careful with that,” Natasha says. 

“Always am.”

“Well, I’ll try to get there sooner, then.” she says. “Tonight, maybe. Hole up and lay low. I’ll come to your hotel first, but if you have to leave, don’t worry—I can find you.”

For the first time, Steve wonders where she is, that she can make it to Moscow in just a few hours.

“Don’t call this number again,” Natasha says. “You need anything, text the code word. Just like always.”

And then she hangs up. Steve stares down at the phone. Out in the room, Ana laughs at something Sam has said. It’s incongruous, that laughter. An anomaly in this space, in this moment. But people have to laugh.

He pockets his phone and goes back out into the main room. Sam and Ana look up at them. Both are smiling; both have glasses half-full of vodka. It could be water, Steve thinks, except water never puts anyone in that light of a mood.

“This is some strong shit,” Sam says, holding out a glass. “Might even get you tipsy.”

But Steve shakes his head. “No thanks.” He sits down next to Ana. Her eyes are bright. He doesn’t care how strong the vodka is, it’s only been a few minutes—they can’t possible be that drunk.

“My contact will be here tonight,” he says. “She’ll get you to a SHIELD safehouse.”

“There are no more SHIELD safehouses,” Ana says, and takes a long drink.

“Yes, there are,” Steve says. “They’re just underground. Former SHIELD safehouses. But I swear you’ll be safe from HYDRA.”

Ana leans back in her chairs. “We’ll see,” she says, “but I suppose it’s better than nothing.” She looks at him. Her hair has fallen down around her face and there’s something about her eyes, the sharp edge of her cheekbones, that reminds Steve suddenly and painfully of Bucky. 

“I guess you’ll be wanting that information now.” She takes another drink. “Everything I know.”

“I just want to hear about the Winter Soldier,” Steve says.

“Yeah, yeah.” She peers at him over the top of her glass. “I’ve never seen him in person, although my work is such that I would have been cleared as one of his handlers eventually. Assuming I hadn’t done—” she gestures around the room with one hand—“this. So thank you for breaking into my laboratory and ruining my career.” 

Steve sighs. “You didn’t have to tell us anything.” 

She sips from her vodka in response. “They only activate him when it’s absolutely necessary. He becomes harder to control the longer he’s deployed—I’m not certain why. Classified, you know.”

“Why was he activated now?” 

Ana laughs. She looks down at her glass and swirls the vodka around. “To kill you, Captain America.”

Steve already knew this. Bucky had told him this himself. But it still hurts him deep inside his chest. 

“You’re not telling us anything to new,” Sam says. “Why Steve in particular? Why not the rest of the Avengers?”

Steve hears the hint of paranoia in the question— _Are the rest of the Avengers HYDRA too?_

“I don’t know. Not privy to that level of information.” Ana drains the rest of her glass and fills it again, her eyes on the crystalline flow of vodka. “I suspect the rest of the Avengers are to be killed next. But they were adamant about getting you first.” She looks at Steve, squinting, like he’s a subject to be studied. “I will tell you this. They’re planning something. Coming out of the shadows, trying to prove you haven’t done the damage you thought you did. Two more heads and all that.”

She knocks back her glass and drains it in one long, breathless gulp. When she finishes she tosses the glass to the carpeted floor, where it bounces and rolls but doesn’t shatter. Her head lolls against the chair. “And the shadows are exactly where you’re condemning me, isn’t it, Captain America? We’ve swapped places.” 

She laughs, a loud, wet sound that fills Steve with pity. He glances over at Sam and can tell, from the way Sam is trying to keep his expression calm and nonjudgemental, that he feels the same. It’s the same expression Sam gets whenever Steve tries to talk to him—about the war, about being frozen, about thinking he’d been fighting for the right team all this time. And for the first time, Steve wonders if there’s any real difference between himself and Ana. She knew she was working for HYDRA, sure, but it didn’t take much to turn her away from them. She didn’t kill herself, for one. He knows she has to have cyanide tablet.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” Steve says, trying to keep his voice patient. “Anything to help me find him?”

Ana lifts one hand, swipes at the air. “I told you. He’s looking _for you_. You don’t have to _find_ him.” She laughs again, drops her head in Steve’s direction. Says a few words of Russian. Then: “Good luck, I should say.”

Sam stands up and walks over to Steve. Steve keeps watching Ana. She’s closed her eyes, and her hand moves back and forth, like she’s conducting music only she can hear.

Sam kneels beside Steve, says softly, “I think that’s all she’s got.”

“It’s something.” Steve doesn’t tell Sam how cold he feels. “It confirms our suspicions.” He stands up. Ana sings in Russian. Her eyes are still closed. “And it tells us the rest of the Avengers aren’t HYDRA. We were right to trust Tony with those files after all.”

Sam doesn’t say anything.

“I need some fresh air,” Steve says. “It’s awfully hot in here.”

He goes out on the balcony. Cold wind sweeps in from the city. The truth is Ana’s intel did give Steve something—it’s just not something he wants to share with Sam. Bucky. They want Bucky to kill Steve first.

Any one of the Avengers would be a threat. Bruce alone, when he calls on the Hulk, is more of a danger than Steve could ever be. But they went after _him_. Bucky’s friend. Bucky’s—he doesn’t have a word for it. Boyfriend sounds wrong. Lover sounds sordid. And they were friends, too, best friends, it was just that their friendship had something else, an extra layer of intimacy that was like lifting a dirty veil from an object in an abandoned house and finding a Michelangelo. 

And if HYDRA sent Bucky after Steve first, then they knew. The longer he’s activated, the harder he is to control—that’s what Ana said. And he’d started to remember, that day on the Helicarriers. Steve is sure of it. He’s harder to control because he starts to remember.

 Steve has to be dead first, before any other plan can be implemented.

Because the Winter Soldier will start to remember.

Because the Winter Soldier will start to remember _him_.

Steve is the Winter Soldier’s defect.

Steve grips the balcony railing and leans into the wind. He registers the cold but it doesn’t bother him; it never bothers him. Physical discomfort, lack of sleep, lack of food—fine. The serum took care of all that. But it can not stop this bittersweet ache in his heart, this idea that the Winter Soldier is only Bucky because of Steve. That he’s the key.

Moscow stretches out in front of him. If Ana is to be believed—and Steve sees no reason not to, not with this—Bucky is on his way here. He will track Steve down, violent and brutal and brainwashed by HYDRA. Sam and Ana, they’ll be gone. Off with Natasha. Safe.

And Steve will be here, waiting in the cold.


	7. The Winter Soldier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of quick notes:
> 
> This is the chapter where that "graphic depictions of violence" warning starts to come into play. Consider yourself warned!
> 
> There's also some terrible Russian in this chapter. I unfortunately don't know ANYONE remotely familiar with Russian, so I had to make do, and I apologize for that. If anyone sees fits to correct the translations, I will happily fix the mistakes. 
> 
> Thanks! And thanks to everyone who has been reading, kudosing, and commenting <3

Komissarov lives in an apartment on the edge of a park. The building is old but well cared for, and in the spring flowers probably grow outside the windows, and the trees probably cast green shadows over the sidewalk.

But it’s not the spring. Everything looks dead.

The Winter Soldier watches the apartment building all day, sitting at a metal table in the park, a Russian newspaper spread out in front of him. He wears civilian clothes, a heavy coat and black gloves to hide his arm, a brimmed hat to hide his face. He watches people go in and out of the building. A pair of teenage girls, giggling and holding hands. An older woman in a fur coat. A middle-aged man with a baby and a bag of groceries. 

He doesn’t see Komissarov. This doesn’t concern him. Komissarov must be nearly ninety, and the cold air would be harsh on an old man’s bones. If it were spring, if there were flowers and leaves on the trees, he would come out to feel the warmth on his skin, and the Winter Soldier would kill him in the sunlight. Make it look like a mugging. A car accident, maybe. But he stays inside. 

And so the Winter Soldier waits until nightfall. 

It’s easy to slip into the apartment building unnoticed. The Winter Soldier picks the lock on a service entrance and eases the door shut behind him. No cameras, no retinal scans, no armed guards. He hasn’t broken into a civilian building in a long time—the memories of the last time he did it are fuzzy, indistinct, there and not there. Still, it’s not exactly a challenge. He’s been trained for far more difficult missions, and the memories that were woken up at the Zvezdnyy Building have faded again, blurring back into shadows. They aren’t a distraction. The only thing that hasn’t disappeared is the image of Komissarov’s face, sharp lines and shadowed eyes. 

The Winter Soldier wants to be able to recognize him.

He moves through the hallway, sticking to the darkness. His goggles let him see through shadows. Most of the apartments are quiet, although he occasionally hears television voices or music drifting through the walls. He takes the stairs up to the third floor. Komissarov’s apartment is the last one at the end of the hall—apartment 373, the worn out number forming a tattered symmetry on the door. The Winter Soldier stops. He can hear the buzzing, although it’s distant, as if it were coming from the street outside. Komissarov is on the other side of that door, sleeping, thinking he has gotten away with his crimes. 

The Winter Soldier breaks the lock. A deadbolt, but he’s able to blast it out of the door with nothing but a hiss of air. It thumps when it hits the floor. Carpet. Good.

He eases the door open. The apartment is dark, the curtains drawn tight over the windows, and there is an old-man smell on the air, medicine and cheap soap. A narrow sliver of moonlight falls on a lump of a couch, a lone spot of brightness through the veil of the goggles. The Winter Soldier steps in, shuts the door behind him. That broken lock is going to be a problem. Make it look like a robbery, that’ll be his best bet, although even then it’s going to be sloppy. He’d set an explosion but he isn’t interested in killing Komissarov’s neighbors. That man with the baby. Those teenage girls. The old woman in the fur coat.

The apartment building settles around him as he moves forward. He’s already got his gun out, a pistol, couple of shots to the heart and the head, pick up some jewelry and get the hell out. He steps into the hallway. Two doors facing each other. One closed, one open. The open door leads to a bathroom. He leans in, scanning. Empty pill bottles on the counter. A toothbrush. The Winter Soldier catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror, inverted by the goggles, light where there should be dark, dark where there should be light. 

He ducks out and moves into the bedroom.

The door creaks when he opens it. He’s ready to shoot, but he finds the room as dark and still as the rest of the apartment—although the scent of Komissarov is stronger here, and it’s not been diluted with medication and poverty. The buzzing roars up in the Winter Soldier’s head, thumping out a rhythm like a heartbeat. There’s a lump in the middle of the bed, breathing in and out. Snoring a little. The Winter Soldier stares at it and he remembers a flash of electricity, the scent of burned flesh and singed hair, Komissarov laughing in the corner with one of his secretaries while his assistants lash the Winter Soldier down to a wooden chair.

_You are no longer Sergeant Barnes_ , Komissarov says in Russian, a different time but the Winter Soldier still sees the image of Komissarov flirting with his secretary, still sees the brightness of electricity. _You are no longer Sergeant James Barnes, you are Codename Winter Soldier. Say it._

_Codename Winter Soldier_.

The Winter Soldier rips off his goggles and turns on the light. He doesn’t want to see Komissarov in shades of black and green. He wants to see him in full color. He wants to see the red of his blood.

Komissarov doesn’t wake up with the light. The Winter Soldier stalks forward and yanks the blankets from the bed. He can’t hear anything but the buzzing.

Komissarov gasps and sits up, his wide, confused. His face is ancient and craggy, lined with years of living, but the Winter Soldier can see the youthful Komissarov, the one who tortured him and took his name away, still lurking beneath that faded exterior.

“Chto proiskhodit? Kto—”  And then Komissarov’s mouth gapes open. He doesn’t finish his question. He knows who it is.

 The buzzing in the Winter Soldier’s head stops, and the silence that follows is as loud as anything he’s ever heard. 

“Kto poslal tebya?” Komissarov says.

“No one,” the Winter Soldier says, and he doesn’t know why he answers in English.

He fires his gun three times. Once to miss, once for the head, once for the heart. The miss is for the investigators, the other two are for Komissarov. Blood splatters up against the wall, across the bed sheets. The Winter Soldier drops his gun to his side. He watches Komissarov bleed, watches his skin grow pale and sickly in the garish light. After missions for HYDRA there is always a sense of satisfaction, another day’s work done. But right now the Winter Soldier doesn’t feel anything. The buzzing comes back, fainter than before. He remembers sparring some KGB agent in a frozen courtyard, snow spiraling down around them. Komissarov watching with a clipboard. Always the god damned clipboard. 

The Winter Soldier holsters his gun and glides around the room, pulling books off the shelves and opening up drawers in the desk. Someone will have heard those gunshots, but he needs to make it look like a robbery. Needs to keep HYDRA off his trail.

It doesn’t take long for him to find a box stuffed with bills, euros and  rubles both. He grabs the bills, shoves them into the pocket in the side of his leg, and leaves through the window, kicking the glass in with his foot.  The third floor is low enough that with his enhanced strength he’s able to make the jump, landing like a cat on the ground below and then running, running fast enough that he can feel his heart thudding inside his chest. 

He expected, when he killed Komissarov, for a hole somewhere inside of himself to be filled. This didn’t happen. He should have known better.

* * *

The safehouse is a second floor walk-up apartment in the center of Moscow. It’s stocked with weapons for the Venerates mission, machine guns and sniper rifles and little round bombs made of the same material as his arm; once activated, they’ll detonate when he thinks the command. All weapons designed to kill Captain America and the rest of the Avengers. The Winter Soldier doesn’t care about any of them. Not the weapons, not the Avengers. 

That is not his mission. Not anymore.

He goes into the bedroom and throws his pistol on the bed along with the money he stole from Komissarov. He collapses down in the desk chair beside the bed and leans forward, arms on his knees, staring at the money. His heart rate has slowed to normal; he doesn’t feel any physical fatigue. But there’s that ache in his chest, that feeling of hollowness Komissarov’s death didn’t fill. And it makes him desperate.

He reaches over and grabs one of the euros off the bed. Part of him doesn’t want to keep the money, wants to rip it into confetti or toss it on the fireplace and light a match. The money’s— _dirty_. The Winter Soldier’s not sure why, if it’s because it comes from Komissarov, or because he stole it. It’s a foreign concept, either way. He’s not going to destroy it, of course, that would be idiotic. Especially if he goes on the run from HYDRA—

Something thrums in the back of his brain. Is that what he’s doing? Breaking free, going out on his own? Has he done it before? It seems like he might have. He has the strength, the fire power. But he can’t remember.

The Winter Soldier stares at the money scattered across the bed. Multicolored Russian faces stare back at him. It doesn’t feel dirty anymore—he wonders where that thought came from. Himself? Or some other version of himself? 

Was that something Sergeant-James-Bucky-Barnes would have thought? 

The Winter Soldier stands up and sweeps the bills into a messy pile so he can count it. That’s something productive—it lets him know where he stands.

(Especially if he’s going on the run.)

Nearly 185 in euros, 35,000 in rubles. Better than what he had before, which was nothing of his own. He’s got the safehouse weapons, too, plus his knives and his arm—his favorite weapons, really, the ones that fail him the least. He searches around the safehouse, looking for a wallet, something to put the money in, and winds up with a plastic bag from under the kitchen sink, some artifact left over from a previous mission, involving different agents. He crams the money into the bag and knots it secure. Not an ideal situation, but it’ll have to do. Then he crams the bag into his pocket, zips it up. Better to keep the money on him in case he has to make a quick getaway.

The apartment is too hot—weird, in this place—and the Winter Soldier feels as if he can’t breathe. So he pries open a window that faces into an alley and leans out, breathing in the freezing night air. It calms him down. He’d hardly been aware of how agitated he was, how— _anxious_. Anxiety is not an emotion he associates with sitting around an empty safehouse. It’s not even an emotion he associates with a mission.

The night is silent save for the occasional roar of a car engine on the main road. Even though he is, technically, out in the open, the Winter Soldier likes it better out here—easier to tell if someone’s coming for him. Easier to escape an attack, more room to fight. And so it makes it easier for him to think.

Komissarov is dead. But there were other names on that list, and he knows there were others still, unnamed, who worked on him, who built him, who made him who he is. Sometimes he can almost see their faces, although they aren’t clear, just outlines, sketches. Not enough for him to grasp on to.

But he has those names.

Stanislav Golov.

Yuri Lukin.

Boris Maslak.

Alois Hafner.

The Winter Soldier leans against the railing. He looks out into the night. He will find the rest of those names. He will kill them if they are not already dead.

And maybe those deaths will make him whole again.

* * *

The safehouse phone rings the next morning. It’s old, and the ring is jangling and bright, not like the electronic chirping he’s had to get used to during the course of this activation. He’s not asleep when it rings; he hasn’t slept all night, but instead stayed up and tried to determine a way to get intel on the names without HYDRA knowing what he was up to.

The Winter Soldier’s not going to answer the phone at first, but it keeps ringing, an endless repetition of a sound that’s familiar to him, almost, in a way that has nothing to do with missions. He knows it’s probably Dixon, he knows Dixon probably knows he’s here.

So he answers it. “Yeah?”

“Line secure,” Dixon says, and there’s a trilling on the other end. The Winter Soldier waits.

“Report,” Dixon says. “Has the target been terminated?”

The Winter Soldier looks out the window. Gray sunlight on a dirty brick wall. He gets a flash in the back of his head like the electricity, and he knows that he needs to choose his answers carefully.

“No. I haven’t been able to locate him.”

A pause on the other end.

“I followed up on the intel,” the Winter Soldier says, which is not a lie—he did visit the Zvezdnyy Building. “But the man’s disappeared. Same thing with Ananyeva. He’s probably got outside help.”

“Who?” Dixon barks. “He doesn’t have any allies. Romanoff destroyed what little remained of SHIELD—”

“I don’t know. But he’s not here.”

“Not here? You mean not in Moscow?”

“I haven’t been able to find him.”

More silence. The Winter Soldier keeps staring out the window. A black bird flies by, lands on the balcony railing. Looks at him through the glass.

“We have no evidence that he’s left the city, much less than the country.”

“You didn’t give me enough,” the Winter Soldiers says. “I don’t know where the fuck he is. If you want me to find him, I need to know more than the fact that he was at the Zvezdnyy Building three days ago. He’s not going to go back.”

The bird flaps away. This conversation is hollow. The Winter Soldier doesn’t give a damn about Captain America. He doesn’t give a damn about the Venerates mission. 

On the end of the line, Dixon says. “If you don’t get this taken care of in the next forty-eight hours, I’m gonna have to bring you in. Lock and key. You know the drill.”

The Winter Soldier sees that flash of electricity again. He thinks of heavy metal bars. He does not know the drill. He can’t remember it.

“Well, then send me some better intel,” the Winter Soldier says, and before Dixon can reply, he hangs up the phone.

He waits, heart pumping.

But Dixon doesn’t call back. Two hours pass, and the phone rings, and a voice on the other end—not Dixon—says, “The Metropol. Checked in under the name Adrian Stubbs.”

There is a pause, as if the voice expects him to write the information down. 

“Your target’s waiting. Happy hunting, Winter Soldier.” 


	8. Steve Rogers

Natasha shows up in the middle of the night, preceded by a text to Steve’s phone: _On my way. Don’t shoot me_. Two minutes later someone knocks on the door. It’s her, although her hair’s dark, and she’s wearing glasses Steve knows she doesn’t need. 

“God, it’s good to see you,” he says.

Natasha grins at him and steps inside, closing the door behind her. “Yeah, well, can’t stay long. We need to get the girl out of here. If he’s coming after you, you can be damned sure he’s coming after her, too.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. Ana’s asleep on the couch, cocooned in blankets from Steve’s bed. Sam’s sleeping too, off in the other bedroom. Steve offered to stay awake, to wait for Natasha and to watch for any attacks from HYDRA. Plus he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep anyway. Too much anxiety—about Ana, about Bucky. About everything.

“How are things?” Steve asks.

Natasha peers up at him. “I just said I couldn’t stay, and here you are making small talk.”

Steve shrugs. “I’m trying to be polite.”

“I’m not complaining.” Natasha crosses her arms over her chest and looks at the lump on the couch that is Ana. “It’s kind of nice, actually. Haven’t been around many people these days.”

Steve wants to ask more, wants to know where she’s living, how she’s managing to weather the threat of her blown cover, but she’s already sweeping across the room, over to the couch. She nudges Ana in the shoulder, murmurs something in Russian. Ana groans, pulls the blanket over head.

“She drank quite a bit before she fell asleep,” Steve says, hoping that’s useful information.

Natasha laughs, hard and bitter. “Yeah, well, I imagine she’d have to. What all did you get out of her?” She looks over her shoulder at him. The moonlight coming in through the window makes her pale and unearthly, and it reflects off her glasses, hiding her eyes. 

“Bucky was assigned to kill me,” Steve says flatly.

“You already knew that.”

“First.”

Natasha tilts her head. Light slides away from her glasses and he can almost read her expression. Almost.

“First?” she says.

“He’s supposed to kill the other Avengers next. After me. I was his first target.” Steve gestures at Ana. “At least, that’s what she thinks. She didn’t know much, but she talked easily. She must not have liked it, working for HYDRA.”

Natasha nods.

“Be careful,” he says. “We need to warn the others, but I figure as long as I’m alive—you’re safe.”

Natasha’s expression is unreadable.

“You still think you can save him?” she says, after a long pause. 

They stare at each other. Not for the first time, Steve wonders if she knows. He doesn’t think it would bother him if she does. It might even be nice, to sit down with someone, over coffee like normal people, and talk about it. Talk about what it’s like to have the two people you’ve loved, really loved, be separated from you for seventy years. What it’s like to have both of them lose their memories. What it’s like to have one of them try to kill you.

Well. Maybe their conversation wouldn’t be entirely normal.

“I know I can save him,” Steve says.

And Natasha smiles at that, the high-wattage incandescent smile she turns on when she wants something or when she really means it. Steve thinks he knows her well enough to know she really means it here.

“Then I guess the rest of us don’t need to watch our backs, do we?”

Steve laughs. “You should probably still watch your backs. HYDRA can always send—”

“It was a joke.” She shakes her head, then turns back to Ana. “I really need to wake up Sleeping Beauty here. Is Sam staying with you?”

“I’m not sure. I told him he didn’t have to, but I doubt he’ll listen.” 

Natasha smiles. “You soldiers. Gotta love the loyalty.” She kneels beside Ana and shakes her again, more roughly this time. Whatever she says in Russian is louder and harsher than before. Ana bolts up, gasping. 

“It’s all right,” Steve says. “This is the contact I was telling you about.”

Ana blinks. Then she looks over at Natasha as if seeing her for the first time. 

“You speak Russian,” she says.

“I am Russian.” Natasha straightens up and holds out her hand. “Now, I’m afraid we need to leave. You can sleep in the car.”

Ana says something in Russian, her sentence lilting up at the end like a question. Natasha answers, shrugging. 

“You’ll be safe,” Steve says.

Ana looks over at him. Her eyes are dark. She doesn’t look tired anymore. Or hung over, for that matter. 

“You keep saying that.”

Steve shrugs. “It’s true.”

“Get dressed,” Natasha says. “Use the bathroom. We need to be well out of the city before we stop.”

Ana slides out off the couch, runs her hands through her hair a few times, trying to comb it out. Then she disappears into the bathroom. Steve can hear water running. Natasha leans up against the wall, pulls out her phone, glances at the screen, sticks it back in her pocket.

“Thank you for doing this,” Steve says. “I hope it doesn’t—put you out too much.” 

Natasha shrugs. “Don’t be too thankful. I’m really just passing her off to a couple of ex-SHIELD agents. They’ll smuggle her into one of their stations, get her set up with a new cover. Probably try to recruit her over to the cause.” She pushes a strand of hair behind her ear and looks over at the bathroom door, closed and limned in yellow light. She looks far away, like she’s as trapped in the past as Steve.  But Steve knows it’s pointless to ask her about it. She’ll just deflect the question, make some kind of joke, and that’ll be the end of that.

The door to the other bedroom clicks open; Sam stumbles in, blinking at the light. “Oh, thank God,” he says. “For a minute there I was afraid I was going to have to fight.”

Natasha’s melancholy expression vanishes. “Sam!” she says. “How are you?” Then she laughs, looks over at Steve. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”

“Nothing wrong with basic courtesy,” Steve says.

Natasha rolls her eyes. “So Sam, you want a help a girl out? Free trip through Europe for you.”

“You don’t want me hanging around,” Sam says. “Besides, this guy’s gonna need my help more than you.” He slaps Steve on the back, and Steve grins because he knows it’s expected of him. No, that’s not exactly right—he likes having Sam around. He values Sam’s friendship. But he can’t stand the thought of putting Sam in needless danger because Steve wants—needs—to save Bucky. It’s not fair to ask Sam to do that.

But Steve also knows he’s not asking. Sam’s volunteering. And there’s a difference. 

The bathroom door opens; Ana emerges, looking vaguely alarmed. She’s dressed, her hair combed down. She looks from Steve to Sam to Natasha. Says something in Russian.

“Just you and me,” Natasha says. “I’ll explain on the way out of town. Say your goodbyes.”

“Goodbyes?” Ana laughs. “My life is over because of these two.”

“You didn’t have to talk,” Natasha says. “I know. I’ve been there.”

Ana glares at her.  Natasha doesn’t say anything more. She doesn’t have to.

“Thank you,” Steve says to Ana. “What you told me—it was very useful.” A lie, but a white one, and Steve figures that’s okay as long as you don’t make it a habit.

“Useful? I told you you’re going to die. That’s all. He’ll be here soon.”

“You don’t seem too scared,” Sam says.

“I’m fucking terrified,” says Ana. “I expect to die before the night’s out.”

Natasha looks over at her. Doesn’t say anything, not even in Russian.

“You’re not going to die,” Steve says.

“Hmph. You say that, I don’t believe it.” Ana turns to Natasha and rattles off in Russian; this time, Natasha responds in kind. They head toward the door. Natasha already has her gun out, holding it low, casual. She opens the door first. There’s nothing out there but the yellow fluorescent light of the hallway.

She looks over at Steve. She doesn’t smile. “Be careful,” she says.

“I could say the same to you,” he says.

“I mean it. You don’t know the sort of thing they’re capable of.” She looks over at Ana, who has her arms crossed, foot tapping like she’s impatient. Looks back at Steve. “I do.”

And then, like smoke, like mist, they’re both gone.

* * *

Steve sits out on the balcony, his shield at his feet, trying to settle his nerves. An hour has passed and Sam is asleep again, snoring on the couch. He volunteered to stay up, take the second shift, but Steve refused. “Don’t need to sleep,” Steve told him. Another white lie. “I’ll be fine.”

Another.

He poured himself a few fingers of vodka but he hasn’t tried it yet; the glass balances on the railing, frosting up in the cold. Steve watches his breath cloud out over the lights of the city and thinks back to a night as cold as this one—New York, though, so it was the middle of January, not November. He was sick. Pneumonia. Didn’t have the money for a doctor but Bucky had cared for him, bringing him soup and comic books and medicine that Steve’s pretty sure Bucky filched off a nurse he was dating at the time. This was before the kiss in the alley, before they closed the circuit on their friendship and lit it up like Times Square, but it was during that illness that Steve saw it for the first time. The hot delirium of the fever clarified and sharpened his thoughts, brought them into stark relief, black and white, and he could see it laid out in front of him, in the way Bucky’s hand lingered on his forehead, the way he smoothed Steve’s sweat-soaked hair away from his face, the way his brow furrowed with concern as he said that hey, buddy, things are gonna turn out all right.

Bucky loved him. 

The wind picks up, sharp and stinging. It makes Steve’s eyes water. He grabs the glass of vodka before the wind can topple it over and knocks it back, the way he’s seen people do. The vodka sears his throat, and he drops the glass, coughing. 

His phone rings.

Steve grabs it, expecting an unfamiliar or unknown number—but instead he sees a picture of Tony Stark lounging sideways in his Iron Man suit, wearing an expression that’s probably meant to be seductive. 

“What the hell?” Steve says.

The phone keeps ringing, and Tony keeps leering at him. Steve shakes his head, swipes his finger across the screen.

“What did you do to my phone?” Steve says.

“Hey, great to talk to you, too.”

“What is this _picture?_ ”

“It’s a thing you can do on phones now. I know, I know, the future takes a bit of getting—”

“I know about pictures on phones!” Steve snaps. “Why is _that_ picture on _my_ phone?”

“I put it there,” says Tony. “Listen, you got time to talk? I’ve been looking at those schematics you left for me—crazy shit. Like, crazy Soviet shit. Ancient. But me being me, I think I might have worked something out for you.” 

It takes a Steve a moment to register what Tony is saying. “Worked something out for me?”

“Well, worked something out for your friend, more like. Hey, I didn’t interrupt your dinner or anything? I know you old-timers like to eat early—”

He thinks Steve’s still in D.C. Well. No wonder he called in the middle of the night.

“No,” Steve says, “you didn’t interrupt my dinner.”

But Tony’s already off on another tangent, talking about electrical surges and 1960s circuit boards.

“Wait, wait, slow down,” Steve says. “You never told me what you did, exactly.”

“Right, sorry.” There’s the sound of typing on the other end of the line. “Okay. Those schematics—I figured out what they were used for.”

Steve’s chest tightens. “Yeah?”

A pause. Tony clears his throat. “It’s the reason he didn’t remember you. They erased his memory. Just—electrocuted it right the hell out of him.”

Numbness washes over Steve. Of course he knew it was _something_ like that, he knew Bucky wouldn’t just forget him completely. But now Tony’s chatter about circuits and electricity takes on a sinister air, and even though he doesn’t want to Steve has a sudden image of Bucky, Bucky as the Winter Soldier, long hair and fierce expression, inundated with 10,000 volts. Enough to kill a man. Or kill his past.

“Oh,” Steve finally manages to choke out.

“I’m sorry, man, I really am. But—that’s not actually why I called. I think I can recreate it.”

“What,” Steve says. “Why? Was this Fury’s idea? Because we’re not erasing his memory. Absolutely not. I refuse.”

“Hey, calm down, soldier. You misunderstand. I can recreate it, and possibly— _possibly_ —reverse the process.”

Steve drops the phone in his lap. Tony’s voice spills out, tinny and far away. Reverse the process. Bring Bucky back.

He fumbles around for the phone, holds it up to his ear.

“—Dangerous, of course, but that’s nothing I haven’t worked around before. You’ll just need to get him back to California, which, psh, good luck with that.”

“Wait,” Steve says. “Dangerous?”

“Having trouble keeping up? Yeah, it could be dangerous. It’s a hell of a lot harder to put a memory back in, but fortunately for Mr. Happy the memories never actually gotten taken out, they were just _buried_.”

“Don’t call him that,” Steve says.

“I’ve got a prototype built—well, mostly built, just need to add a few finishing touches—but if you can get your boy out here, I can fix him up, good as new.”

Steve stares out at the city. Light twinkle on in the buildings, twinkle off again. They almost look like stars. 

“I’m in Moscow right now,” Steve says. “And so is Bucky. I flew out here on a civilian plane, and I have no idea how I’m going to get him back—”

“Well, I can’t take this thing out of the state,” Tony says. “Hell, I would if I could, but without SHIELD’s protection—” He lets the rest of his sentence hang there in the silence.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Steve says. Then, after a second’s pause, he says, “Thank you. This—look, it means a lot to me, that you’d be willing work on this for me. And for Bucky.”

“Yeah, well, it was interesting. Give me a call before you show up, I want to make sure everything’s fortified. The last thing I need is another house blowing up on me.”

Steve says he will and then he ends the call, dropping the phone in his lap. His thoughts vibrate around inside his head. A way to uncover Bucky’s memories. But dangerous—and using the same machinery that erased the memories in the first place. Steve’s not sure he can do that to him. He saw the diagrams—the helmet, the restraints. He can’t put Bucky in something like that and flip the switch, even if it would make Bucky better. He just can’t.

Steve picks up the bottle of vodka and stares into it, the liquid distorting the lights from the city. He wishes it would do something for him. He could use a bit of oblivion right now.

On the other side of the bottle—something moves.

Steve tenses, all his senses going into high alert. He sets the bottle aside and scans across the city. Doesn’t see anything but shadows and neon.

Probably just a cat, he tells himself.

But then something glints out of the corner of his eye. A flash of silver light. It’s like hearing Peggy’s laugh across a crowded room—it’s that kind of familiar.

Steve grabs his shield and stands up, crouching in fighting stance. Moscow waits for him in the darkness, the cold wind like her steady, sleeping breath. He keeps looking for the silver hidden in the darkness.

Then—

Movement.

It happens fast: a dark blur leaps from the building across the alley, silver gleaming like moonlight, and Steve throws up his shield and he holds his breath and there’s a huge resounding _clang_ and Steve feels the impact echo out of his shield and up his arm. He gets thrown backward, slams up against the wall. The brick crumbles and cracks beneath the weight of his body.

Bucky stares at him from the other side of the balcony.

His face is bare. He looks like the photograph Steve saw in the Zvezdnyy Building, like a man undone. He doesn’t hold a weapon, but there’s a sniper rifle strapped to his back, and God knows what else is tucked away in that black tactical uniform.

“Bucky,” Steve says, and holds up his free hand. He’s too stunned to be scared. “I’m unarmed. Just the shield, and we both know that won’t do much against you.”

Bucky watches him, dark eyes glittering. 

“I know you’re here to kill me, but you don’t have to.” Steve forces himself to look at Bucky’s face. The light out here is thin, a sickly blend of moonlight and streetlamps and neon, but Steve’s not going to let it hide Bucky from him. 

“You don’t have to do what they tell you,” Steve says. 

Bucky’s eyes widen. Just a little. Steve tenses and prepares himself for an attack. It doesn’t come. 

“You shouldn’t be sitting out here unarmed,” Bucky says.

His voice hits Steve worse than any punch. Before, on the helicarriers, it had been full of rage and confusion—it had hurt him, hearing Bucky like that, knowing deep down there wasn’t a god damn thing he could to help him. But that rage is gone tonight. It’s just Bucky’s voice, almost soft, almost—concerned.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I hear someone’s trying to kill me.”

Bucky should have smiled at that but he doesn’t. Steve’s heart pounds against his ribcage. He can’t remember the old Bucky, not when this Bucky is standing in front of him, glaring at him. Maybe Steve just imagined that soft voice.

Bucky doesn’t move.

And maybe it’s the vodka. Maybe alcohol can affect him after all. But Steve lowers his shield. 

Bucky’s eyes follow it down. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t reach for that gun.

“We can talk,” Steve says. “I’m trying to help you.”

He holds up the shield like a peace offering, then steps forward. Bucky tenses. His hand is at his hip. A knife. There’s a knife there. Steve watches his fingers. He thinks about Bucky touching him—touching his face, his hair, his chest. Bucky doesn’t pull the knife out of its sheath. Steve lays the shield down on his chair.

“There,” he says, and he lifts his hands over his head. “That’s it. Just me.”

A freezing wind gusts up from the street. It brings the scent of gasoline and dead leaves. Bucky’s hair blows across his face but he doesn’t push it away. 

“You don’t tie that back?” Steve says, and he nods toward Bucky, and he smiles, to show him that he’s just making a joke.

“Get the hell out of Moscow,” Bucky says. “Tonight. Right now.”

“What?” Steve deflates. He drops his arms. “Why? Bucky, just let me talk to you—”

“My name’s not fucking Bucky.” His eyes glitter. He steps forward and Steve hates himself for it but he tenses. He doesn’t want to fight him again. He won’t. “If you stay here, I’m going to have to kill you. So go to ground. If they can’t give me the intel, I can’t find you.”

Steve feels as if the balcony is crumbling underneath his feet.

_He doesn’t want to kill me._

_He doesn’t want to see me._

“I’ve got things to take care of,” Bucky says. “They don’t concern you. So stay the fuck off their radar and we won’t have a problem.”

The wind gusts again, and this time Bucky jumps. After standing still for long it’s a shock to see movement, but even then Steve barely sees it—Bucky’s feet lift off the ground and he vanishes over the side of the balcony before Steve can barely register what happens. A velvety _thud_ drifts up from the street down below. Steve lunges at the railing. Looks down. 

The street is empty and dark. Snow gleams in the moonlight. Snow, and the reflection of metal, bouncing off the glass in the windows as Bucky runs away.


	9. The Winter Soldier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Afraid there's a bit of violence and more bad Russian in this chapter. 
> 
> As always, I want to thank everyone who taken the time to read, kudos, and comment. It means a lot to me <3

The Winter Soldier doesn’t stop running until the hotel has vanished into the tangle of buildings that make up Moscow. He doesn’t stop running until he’s out of the tourist district, until he’s in some shabby neighborhood with cracks in the sidewalk and broken glass in the street. He ducks into a narrow, dank alley, leans up against the brick, and breathes.

He recognized the man again.

It’s not the same recognition as when he read the files at the safe house. It doesn’t come slamming into him like a thrown fist. It’s a touch, feather-soft, a mother’s cool hand on a fevered forehead. When he saw Steve Rogers on the balcony, when Rogers laid the shield down, held up his hands—for a second, a portion of a second, the Winter Soldier felt _safe_.

He can’t remember the last time he felt safe.

The Winter Soldier takes another deep breath. It’s starting to snow, white dots drifting lazily down through the gaps in the building. He went to the Metropol to kill Steve Rogers. He didn’t want to but he figured he could get it taken care of and focus on the rest of the names on his list as he moved forward on the Venerates Project. Figured it would be worth it just to get Dixon off his ass.

He was going to do it with a sniper shot, clean and easy and yeah, instantaneous, too, painless—sometimes he thinks like that even though he knows he’s not supposed to. He positioned himself on the roof of the hotel across the way, lined up his shot, peered through the scope. 

He saw the other soldier first, the one with the wings. Wilson. Moving past the windows, hands gesturing, talking. The Winter Soldier thought he might be talking to Ananyeva, and he rested his finger on the trigger, arm tensed. But the woman didn’t move into view. He realized later she wasn’t there, that they must have dumped her somewhere. Instead, it was the man on the bridge, blonde hair and lean torso. The Winter Soldier sucked in his breath. His heart started clanging around in his chest. 

He slipped his finger off the trigger.

He watched them through the scope, Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson. Mostly he watched Steve Rogers. The scope made him grainy and turned his movements almost jerky, as if the Winter Soldier were watching an old filmstrip recording. Like he was watching him in the past. 

Sam Wilson disappeared into another room. Steve Rogers sat at a desk by the window, staring out at the city. It was a clear shot but the Winter Soldier didn’t take it. He couldn’t. His mind was racing, churning around, trying to grasp on to whatever it was that made the blond man so damned familiar. Why looking at him made the Winter Soldier feel warm, almost hot, despite the freezing Moscow air, the threat of snow.

When Steve Rogers came out onto the balcony, the Winter Soldier knew he couldn’t kill him. It was a certainty that cut through the usual haziness of his thoughts. He wasn’t going to kill Steve Rogers. To hell with Dixon and the rest of HYDRA. 

The Winter Soldier took his eye away from the scope and Steve Rogers shrunk down until he became a doll on the balcony. The Winter Soldier packed up his weapon. He meant to leave, slip into the night like he’d never been there, but he glanced up at the balcony and Steve Rogers was close to the railing, peering out into the night, and the Winter Soldier felt something grab onto his heart and squeeze. He leapt the distance between the buildings without thinking. Landed on the balcony without thinking. Warned Steve Rogers to get the fuck out without thinking.

He doesn’t regret it.

The snow’s falling harder now, pilling up in the corners of the alley. The Winter Soldier slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the cold hard ground. His gun digs into his back. It’ll be easier this way, he thinks. The longer he drags out looking for Steve Rogers, chasing him all over Europe, the easier it’ll be to find the names on the list. He’s already tracked down one. Yuri Lukin. Still alive and living on the outskirts of Russia. He can kill him tonight. Maybe it’ll help.

But he doesn’t get up to leave. Something about this alley feels familiar to him, the way Steve Rogers feels familiar. It’s something— _good_. Like lights in a window, that first blast of dry manufactured heat when you come in from the cold. 

The Winter Soldier concentrates. He tries to remember. He thinks back to the display at the Smithsonian, his grainy face watching him from the photographs. But it’s not his face he keeps seeing—it’s Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers before he was Captain America. Skinny and pale. Weak. And for some reason the Winter Soldier can imagine holding that frail, thin body close. He can imagine what it would feel like, a head resting on his chest, a bony shoulder digging into the side of his arm. 

He feels a surge of desire. It startles him; desire is another thing he hasn’t felt in a very long time. Hasn’t allowed himself to feel. He associates it with hurting, although he can’t remember why. That’s probably been shocked out of him. But tonight, sitting in the snow, the desire doesn’t hurt him. It’s like that sense of safety, settling over him. It’s right. It’s the way of things.

The snow falls. The Winter Soldier draws his knees up to his chest and curls in on himself like a child. He thinks about Steve Rogers.

* * *

He steals a car to drive out of Moscow. Dixon’s probably calling the safe house right now, demanding to know how the mission went, but the Winter Soldier figures he can work this into his story. Tell him he followed a lead out to the countryside, even if it didn’t turn up Steve Rogers.

It’s still dark when he drives past the edge of Moscow, although the city was just starting to wake up. Shop lights switching on, cars moving out into the streets. The snowfall last night has covered up most of the sidewalks, and it reminds him of the winter mornings he spent firing shot after shot by himself on the gun range. Too cold for the scientists to come out and watch him. It’s almost a fond memory, and unlike those strange dreamy memories of Steve Rogers, he knows what it is, he knows that it happened to him.

He knows this is happening, too, and he hopes when it’s done, he’ll feel solid again.

Yuri Lukin lives in a farmhouse set a couple of kilometers off the main road. The Winter Soldier drives past the farmhouse, the car’s old tires spinning out against the dirt. In the gray early morning light the house looks abandoned. It looks dead.

He parks the car in the grass and watches the house. He doesn’t bother covering his face. Let Lukin see him. He will be the last thing Lukin sees.

Snow starts falling, thick white flakes that look like stars, like static. Wind blows through the branches of the dead tree next to Lukin’s front door. The Winter Soldier picks up the sniper rifle from its place in the front passenger seat and lays it sideways across his lap.

Something moves in the window.

The Winter Soldier stops. The movement’s small, a flicker—he thinks at first it’s a cat. But then the curtains draw back, and a face appears behind the glass. An old face, drawn, eyes sunk deep into their sockets.

The buzzing starts in the back of the Winter Soldier’s head. For a moment he sees Lukin as a young man, cruelly handsome, grinning like the devil as he bends over him, as he pulls the metal arm away and says, “We don’t want to see this get damaged, do we?” And then throwing him out in the cold, one-armed, weaponless, enemies lurking among the dead trees. Training. The Winter Soldier remembers the blood on the snow.

The face vanishes behind the curtain.

The Winter Soldier moves fast, kicking open the car door and leaping out into the piercing air and steadying the rifle, all in one liquid movement. He hears a bang like a gunshot—no, not a gunshot. A door slamming into its frame.

Lukin’s escaping.

The Winter Soldier bolts around the side of the house. The wind stings at his eyes. Not ideal conditions but he’s worked in worse. Lukin is running across the open field, but his movements are panicked and clumsy. He slips on a patch of gathered snow and loses his balance, legs kicking up and out from under him. He lands on his back with a cry of pain.

The Winter Soldier watches through the swirl of snow.

“Nyet!” Lukin screams. His voice echoes through the empty countryside. “Nyet! Nyet! Ya staryy chelovek!”

The Winter Soldier lifts the sniper rifle. He lines Lukin up in the sight and Lukin is suddenly _there_ , close enough to touch. To kill. The buzzing drowns out all the Winter Soldier’s thoughts.

Lukin’s eyes are glassy with fear. “Bud'te dobry.”

The Winter Soldier doesn’t hesitate. The sniper rifle is unnecessary, at this distance, and even with the bitter wind and the white out of snow Lukin’s head disappears in a bloody corona. His body drops. The Winter Soldier lowers his gun.

The buzzing has stopped, replaced by the pitter of snow against the ground. The Winter Soldier walks over to Lukin’s body. If the snow keeps on, he’ll be covered entirely in a few hours, a secret hidden until spring.

Komissarov is dead.

Lukin is dead.

It’s still not enough. 

* * *

He drops the car in front of some dilapidated Soviet-era apartment building and swaps it out for a rattling old sedan that he drives back to a grocery store lot a few blocks from the safe house. He leaves the car there and walks the rest of the way through the snow. The sniper rifle is shoved under his coat. You can probably tell but no one looks twice at him.

The apartment is freezing when he gets up there, so cold he’s sure he can see his breath. The radiator’s off, the coils cold to the touch. He kicks at it, listens to the old metal bang against the wall. Then the radiator gives a groan and an orange glow emerge from deep inside it.

“The job done?”

Dixon’s voice doesn’t startle him; he knew Dixon was there, sticking in the shadows, trying to intimidate him.

“No,” the Winter Soldier says. He drops the rifle on the couch but doesn’t shrug out of his coat, not yet. He turns to Dixon.

“I’ve been trying to contact you,” Dixon says. “Calling all damn night.”

“I was attempting to complete my mission.” The Winter Soldier stands close to the radiator. He’s supposed to be able to withstand the cold but right now it chills him to the bone. He thinks about Lukin lying dead on the ground. He thinks about Steve Rogers dropping his shield, saying, “ _There. That’s it. Just me_.”

“We told you where he was,” Dixon says.

“Yeah. Where he _was_.” The Winter Soldier stares at the radiator. He wonders if he’ll ever feel warm again. “He’s not there anymore. I followed some leads, trying to track him out of the city, but—” The Winter Soldier shrugs. “He’s got help, that’s all I can think.”

“Help?” Dixon’s voice is low and dangerous. “What help? Natasha Romanoff exposed what little help he had—”

“He’s gone.” The Winter Soldier looks at Dixon again. Here in Russia the threat of electricity feels far away, and besides he’s already killed two of them. He can kill Dixon if he has to.  

“They aren’t happy about this, “Dixon says.

The Winter Soldier doesn’t reply.

“They want him dead.”

“I know.” And this time the Winter Soldier thinks of himself on that balcony. _Get the hell out of Moscow_. Steve Roger’s hair shining in the neon. Fucking beautiful. He was fucking beautiful.

The Winter Soldier hopes he took the advice.


	10. Steve Rogers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bet-you-thought-you'd-seen-the-last-of-me.gif
> 
> Ahh! I'm back! This story is back! It's been like two years!
> 
> So Civil War rekindled my Stucky feels, and I decided I would finish this story rather than starting something new. With that in mind... this isn't really canon compliant anymore (not that it was to begin with, really). It's very much a post-Winter Soldier story, not a post-Civil War story.
> 
> So with that out of the way... here we go! Bad Russian up ahead!

Steve and Sam hole up in a cheap, shabby hotel on the outskirts of the city, away from the tourist districts. Steve wants to check in under his own name, wants to wave as much of a red flag as he can in HYDRA’s direction, in _Bucky’s_ direction, but Sam stops him.

“That’ll attract attention you’re not looking for,” he says as they cruised through the streets of Moscow, matching the run-down signs to the Cyrillic letters spelling out the name of the hotel they pulled off the Internet. “And they found you easily enough when you used Adrian Stubbs.”

Sam is right, and that’s why Steve is grateful that he didn’t go with Natasha.

They check into the hotel, the man at the front counter staring at them dolefully as he passes over the key to their room. The lobby is small and cramped and empty, and the elevator is so narrow that both of them won’t fit inside it with their suitcases; Steve lets Sam ride it up to the sixth floor while he takes the stairs. He wants the chance to think anyway.

Dim light filters through the windows in the stairwell, making everything murky, as if it’s underwater. The light matches Steve’s mood. He hates this idea of having to wait.When he set out from Washington with Bucky’s file, that been an _action_. He was not sitting by and letting Bucky rot inside his own head. But now—he has dead-ended. He saw Bucky, he talked to him, but he wasn’t able to bring him of the cold.

And that pierces straight though his heart.

Steve stops at the fourth floor landing, not because he’s tired but because he doesn’t want to get to the room yet. He looks out the window. It’s snowing. Cold air seeps inside and it makes him think of the light reflecting off the metal arm. Bucky’s metal arm. He has to remind himself of that: the arm is part of Bucky now. But that’s okay. It’s not part of the Bucky he remembers but it’s still Bucky. The man he saw on the balcony—that’s still Bucky.

Steve closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Someone laughs in the depths of the hotel, a sound incongruous to his mood. He does not want to sit in the hotel room and wait. He can’t. The passivity of this mission (when did he start thinking of it as a mission?) is making him listless.

Steve turns from the window and makes his way up the next two flight of stairs. He let Sam have the key to the room so he knocks, twice, and then stands back, a little tense. He knows he can’t let his guard down, not for one second.

Sam answers.

“Hey man,” he says. “Thought you got lost on your way up here.”

“Nah.” Steve steps inside. The room is as small and cramped as the lobby. A pair of twin beds, a TV, a door leading off to the bathroom. Not much else. Not even a balcony.

Sam’s studying Steve, watching him from across the room. He’s already set their suitcases on the bed.“Wanna go get some food?” he asks.

It’s so normal. The last few weeks have been nothing but normal. Steve’s not sure he can handle normalcy right now.

“I’m not hungry,” he says. “You can go on, though. Don’t feel like you have to stay cooped up in the room with me.”

Sam doesn’t answer at first. Then he says, “You feel useless.”

Steve laughs, shakes his head. But he knows there’s no point in lying. “Yeah.”

“Well, then, figure out something to do.”

Steve looks up at him. Sam grins at him. “Right? You came all the way over here to find him.” He shrugs. “So find him.”

“Not sure how to do that.”

“Call Natasha.” Sam nods. “What you need is information. If he really is gunning for you, that means he’s got to be close.”

_Gunning for you_. Not the right choice of words. Steve thinks of the balcony, the gun strapped to Bucky’s back where it wasn’t remotely a danger.

“Natasha,” Steve says slowly. “She’s going to be annoyed I’m asking her for more favors.”

“She won’t be that annoyed. Call her.” Sam walks across the room and slaps Steve on the back. “I’m gonna pick us up some food. There’s got to be some fast food joint around here, yeah? What with communism falling and all. You missed that, by the way.”

Steve laughs. “I missed it rising up, too.”

“That you did.” Sam nods at the phone. “Call her.”

And then he steps out of the room, leaving Steve alone.

Steve pulls his phone out of his pocket. Looks down at it for a moment. Then he brings up Natasha’s number, texts _morning glory_ , and waits.

Five minutes later, the phone buzzes on the bedside table. A text with a phone number. Different from last time. He calls.

“If you’ve got another defector for me,” she says, “call someone else.”

Steve smiles. “I’ll keep that in mind if I find one.”

“What’s up?”

“I need information,” Steve says. “Look—Bucky came to the hotel after you left.”

Silence on the other end.

“He didn’t—he didn’t fight me. Just told me to get out of Russia, that if I didn’t he’d have to come kill me. Just like Ana said. But I don’t want to wait, you know? If I could get to him—I know he’s got to be close, but the file doesn’t tell me anything, it’s too old—”

“You want intel.”

Steve startles a little; _intel_ is such an official-sounding word, a SHIELD word, a military word. But then, he’s thinking of finding Bucky as a mission.

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess I do.”

“Knowing he’s in Russia helps. I’ll see if I can find anything. At least he hasn’t been much of a ghost the last few weeks.”

“I guess not.”

“I’ll call you if I find anything.” She pauses. Steve’s about to hang up when she says, “Hey. Stay safe, Steve. Don’t—get yourself hurt.”

There’s something in the way she says it, some inflection in her voice, that tells Steve she’s not talking about physical pain.

“I’ll try my best,” he says.

* * *

Natasha contacts him two hours later. By that point Steve and Sam have polished off a couple of Big Macs and are sprawled out on the bed, watching Russian TV. Waiting. There’s been no sign of the Winter Soldier, of HYDRA, of anyone.

The phone chimes. Steve and Sam both look over at it.

“That’s her,” Steve says, and he grabs the phone, calls the phone number. Another new one.

Natasha answers on the first ring.

“That was fast,” Steve says.

“I was holding the phone.”

“No, I mean—I thought it’d take you longer to get the—”

“You forget how good I am.”

Steve can hear the smile in her voice.

“Anyway, it’s not much, but I think it’s something. If you’d read the newspapers, you’d have found it yourself.”

“I can’t read Russian.”

“And there’s your problem.”

Sam has turned off the TV and is watching Steve from across the room, head tilted. Listening.

“There have been some deaths lately. Suspicious ones.”

Steve’s stomach tightens. “He—he said I was his target—”

“And I’m sure that’s still true. But it seems two old men have died in Russia in the last few days. One in a robbery attempt. The other was shot outside his home, in the country.”

“I don’t—”

“Their names were Roman Komissarov and Yuri Lukin.”

Steve has read through the translations of Bucky’s file enough times that the names are like knife wounds.

“No,” he says softly.

“Yes. Someone’s killing the scientists who worked on Project 38. On—”

“On Bucky,” Steve says.

Sam’s eyes widen. He mouths, _What’s going on?_ Steve shakes his head, holds up one finger.

“Yes. It could be nothing. Could be HYDRA, could be someone else. But—”

“It could be him.”

“I did a quick search on the remaining scientists to see who’s still living in Russia. None of them, unfortunately—”

Steve’s heart sinks.

“But Boris Maslak’s living in Belarus. A little town riiiiight on the border.If you’re in Russia, it wouldn’t be much for someone who’s supposed to be looking for you to go looking for him instead.”

Steve’s heart starts pounding. “This is perfect, Natasha, thank you.”

“You can thank me by not getting yourselves killed. If he’s murdering old HYDRA scientists, he’s not exactly stable.”

No, he isn’t. Steve knows that. Not exactly stable, and not exactly Bucky, either. But closer. Closer than he was that day on the bridge, that day on the helicarriers. And if Steve can beat him to Maslak, if he can stop him somehow, maybe he can make him understand who he was. Maybe that’s the key. Maybe Steve has been approaching this all wrong.

He thanks Natasha and gets the rest of the information from her—the name of the town, Maslak’s home address, and hangs up. He looks over at Sam.

“Well?” Sam says.

“It looks like we’re going to Belarus,” Steve says.

* * *

They leave that day. The hotel clerk raises an eyebrow at them but says nothing; a benefit, Steve supposes, of shabby hotels.

They take the train across the border. It’s a long trip, nearly eight hours, and Sam sleeps through most of it. Steve doesn’t. He tries, leaning his head up against the cold window, listening the rattle of the rails beneath him. It doesn’t work. So he watches the landscape fly by, grayscaled by winter. Snow hits the glass and melts, leaving streaks of water in its wake.

He doesn’t know what he’s going to find in that village in Belarus. If he’ll find Maslak. The Winter Soldier.

Bucky.

Finally, a voice comes over the train, announcing the next stop, first in Russian, then another language Steve can’t place, then English. Sam jars awake. “We’re here?”

“We’re here,” Steve answers. There’s a leaded weight in his stomach.

They gather their bags and disembark—the only ones who do. The station is small and looks abandoned, the windows shuttered, grass growing up around the platform. A few minutes pass and then the train expunges damp white steam and chugs away. Steve watches it go, winding like a snake over the countryside.

“We need a car,” Sam says. “But I’m guessing there’s not an Enterprise around here.”

Steve forces out a grin. “No. Probably not.”

“So what do you want do?” Sam sets his bag on the platform and leans up against it, arms crossed over his chest. “Want to borrow a car?”

“Natasha told you about that?”

“She did indeed.”

“Well.” Steve shrugs. “We’ll have to find a car first.”

Sam grins, heaves up his bag again. They leave the train station, following the narrow stone road through the frozen, dying grass. After about twenty minutes they come across a farm house, an old truck parked in the front yard.

“Just to get us to Maslak’s place,” Steve says. “We’ll have it back by nightfall.”

“Sure thing, Cap.”

It doesn’t take Steve long to hotwire the truck. It’s old enough that the wiring in it feels familiar to the vehicles he worked with back in the war. The way the engine rumbles—that’s familiar too. Rough around the edges, the way engines used to be.

They throw their bags in the bed of the truck and rumble off down the road. Steve pulls the stationary with Maslak’s address out of his pocket and hands it to Sam. “Can you pull up a map for me?”

“Sure thing.”

They drive in silence save for the occasional interjection of driving directions from Sam— _turn left, turn right, there should be some bend in the road here._ Steve focuses on his driving. He doesn’t let himself think about the balcony or the hardness glinting in Bucky’s eyes. He’s got a job to do. Find Maslak. From there: convince Bucky to come back to California. It’s all he’s got.

Soon, they come across a rambling old house jutting sideways out of the earth. It looks like some kind of European-style manor that had been converted by the Soviets into a barracks; now it’s falling into shambles in the cold post-communist winter. Steve parks the truck into park.

“This is it?” he says.

“This is it.”

They stare at the house in silence for a few moments. The clouds are gray and heavy, hanging low to the ground. Threatening snow.

“We should go talk to him,” Steve says. “Warn him. Maybe we can get him to cooperate.”

Sam looks over at Steve. “Cooperate?” he says. “The guy’s HYDRA. You think he’s going to cooperate?”

Steve keeps watching the house. “People do strange things when there’s a chance they might die.”

They climb out of the truck, make their way to the front porch. Steve leaves his shield—he doesn’t want to be too conspicuous—but both of them take pistols. Just in case.

Sam rings the doorbell.

Nothing.

“You think he’s already been here?” Sam asks in a low voice.

Steve rings the doorbell. Of course that’s a possibility. But he doesn’t want to admit it. The other names on the list are scattered far and wide across the globe—it will be difficult to track them, difficult to predict where Bucky would go next.

But then Steve hears footsteps.

He straightens up, glancing over at Sam, who nods and puts his hand close to his gun. The door cracks open. A face peers out. Old, lined, frail. Except for the eyes. Those burn with a fire that makes Steve want to look away.

The face says something in Russia.

“Vy govorite na angliyskom yazyke?” Steve says.

The door pushes open a little wider. Hot, dry air seeps out from inside the house. A man steps out onto the porch.

“Boris Maslak?” Steve says.

The man blinks. “What do you want?” he says, his words crisp and accented.

Steve sighs with relief—he could fumble his way through the Russian, he thinks, but it’ll be much easier to explain in English.

“Who’s this?” Maslak says, gesturing at Sam. “I know who you are.” He points his finger at Steve. “Captain America.”

“I’m Sam,” Sam says. “I’m working with Captain America here. We think your life might be in danger.”

Maslak gives a snort. “My life’s always in danger.” He retreats back into the house and slams the door shut. Steve catches it.

“It’s the Winter Soldier,” Steve says. “He’s coming for you.”

Maslak peers back out. His eyes glitter.

Then he throws back his head and laughs.

“The Winter Soldier?” he says. He shoves the door open again. “I created the Winter Soldier. I was there for his birth. He would never be programmed to kill me.”

Steve feels a shot go through him. _Programmed to kill me_. Not _assigned._ Not _ordered._ But programmed, as if Bucky were some machine they could punch instructions into. Like Steve’s phone, like his laptop.

“He wasn’t,” Steve says, gritting his teeth. “This is not on orders from HYDRA. He’s coming after you on his own.”

Just for a second, Maslak’s eyes go wide. It’s so quick that Steve almost isn’t sure he saw it.

“Bezumnyy!” Maslak spits. “What an absurd thing to say. This is some SHIELD trick, is it not? You think you still have a chance at winning? I tell you, Captain America and Sam, you have already lost.” Maslak grins, lips pulling back to reveal the sharp points of his teeth. “You can’t scare me with the same ghost story we’ve been using to scare you for seventy years.”

The door slams into its frame, rattling the nearby windows. Steve stares at it, his heart pounding.He keeps imagining Maslak hunched over Bucky in some dark, dripping laboratory, inserting commands into his brain, telling him what to believe, what to think, what to do. Breaking him down piece by piece.

And he was so damned _nonchalant_ about it. So sure that his creation lacked the agency to ever turn against him. Steve feels sick to his stomach.

“That went well,” Sam says.

Steve sighs. “We need to stake this place out.”

“I knew you were going to say that.” Sam looks over his shoulder. “We still returning that truck tonight?”

Steve doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know. All he can think about is Bucky creeping through the night to kill this man.

It wouldn’t be the worst loss the world has ever faced. But he still has to stop it. He still has to bring Bucky back in from the darkness.

 

 


	11. The Winter Soldier

The Winter Soldier dresses in civilian clothes, pulling the hood of his coat down low over his face, slipping on gloves to hide the metal of his hand. The cold weather makes it simpler to blend in.

Lukin and Komissarov were the easiest to find because they were the only two still living in Russia. The others will be more complicated. But the Winter Soldier is determined. And if Steve Rogers took his advice and went to ground—it will give him time to complete this mission, his real mission, without having to worry about Venerates.

The Winter Soldier walks to an Internet cafe and uses the some of Komissarov’s rubles to pay for a computer. Then, one by one, he types in the remaining three names. He is still getting used to these kinds of computers. With every activation, computers change. He thinks, vaguely, they used to be girls; now they are phones. But the Winter Soldier knows how to adapt.

Stanislov Golov turns up easily; there is an obituary for a British newspaper which lists his accomplishments. The Winter Soldier’s thoughts burn as he reads through it. Golov died of lung cancer. He left behind no family. It is not fair, that he won’t die at the Winter Soldier’s hands.

But the other two, Maslak and Hafner, they are still alive. Alois Hafner seems to move around Europe and North Africa, leaving enough of a trail to be tantalizing. But Maslak—he may be close by. In Belarus. The Winter Soldier finds his name in a newspaper article. Two years ago he was involved in a land dispute. The Winter Soldier reads through the article, heart hammering. He needs to be certain this is the man. 

And then he finds it, this certainty. There is a picture. 

It’s grainy, the colors watery and washed out. But the Maslak glowering into the camera is the same Maslak who glowered at the Winter Soldier as he debriefed him on his missions. The same Maslak who jammed the electrical nodes into the Winter Soldier’s temples and flipped the switch, flooding his body with electricity. He laughed when he did it, low and cackling, and as the Winter Soldier sits in the cold, thin light of the Internet cafe, he hears that laughter again, vibrating inside his skull.

Belarus. The land dispute was in a village on the border. It will be easy to find.

* * *

Dixon is waiting when the Winter Soldier arrives back at the safe house. He sits on the tatty old sofa, smoking a cigarette. The Winter Soldier stops, stares at him.  
“Where were you?” Dixon says.

“Looking for Rogers. Chasing down leads.”

Dixon sniffs, drops the cigarette in an ancient ashtray. “You aren’t going to find him in Moscow.”

“You sent me here.” The Winter Soldier moves forward, his hand hovering near his knife. Dixon reaches inside his coat for his gun. He think he’s being subtle. It would be so easy to kill him, the Winter Soldier thinks. So easy to slit his throat and run for it. He has slit a thousand throats; he could do it like a dance.

But then Dixon says, “Rogers has been spotted in Belarus.”

The buzzing starts up, faint. Rogers didn’t listen to him. He shouldn’t be surprised—why shouldn’t he be surprised? Because he has known this feeling before.

Telling Steve Rogers to do one thing, Rogers doing the opposite. It gives him a sense of warmth, of contentment. He knows it as well as he knows the lines of Boris Maslak’s face. 

But why?

How?

_You were my friend_ , Steve Rogers told him in Washington.

“We are shipping you out immediately.” Dixon’s voice jerks the Winter Soldier back to the shabby, smoke-scented living room of the safe house. The buzzing fades; the strange feeling of warmth recedes. “He’s right on the border, so this business should be taken care of by nightfall.” Dixon stands up, brushes his hand across his gun. The Winter Soldier just stares at him. “And then we can move on to the rest of Project Venerates.”

Right on the border. Another coincidence. The Winter Soldier feels his blood pounding. Both targets in the same location. He feels like he is seeing pieces, but he can not connect them together. Two targets. They have nothing to do with each other. Steve Rogers is not on the list. He is not part of the Winter Soldier’s pain.

And yet he didn’t listen. He didn’t run. Instead, he went to Boris Maslak.

The Winter Soldier studies Dixon and wonder if this is some trick of HYDRA’s, some new way of getting inside his head. Are they the reason Rogers stirs up these strange sensations of warmth, of happiness, of contentment? What game are they playing?

“Well, soldier?” barks Dixon. “Do you understand your mission or not?”

His eyes are narrow. He watches the Winter Soldier with suspicion.

“I understand,” the Winter Soldier says.

* * *

The house reminds him of the place they trained him in Siberia. That had once been a place for the wealthy aristocrats too. They had stripped it of its glamor, left it to freeze in the snow. The same has happened here. 

The Winter Soldier watches the house through the scope of his rifle. The sun is already starting to set, and the violet light of dusk washes the colors of out of everything. A single window is illuminated in sickly yellow. Maslak is in there somewhere.

Rogers is here, too.

Rogers and Wilson. They are in the woods surrounding the house, sitting in a cheap little car, watching the house through binoculars. Waiting for him, the Winter Soldier supposes, but he doesn’t understand why. I told you to leave, he thinks, and he even though when he said it he had done so without thinking, he’s now besieged by a kind of desperation. Why would Rogers be so fucking stupid?

_Because Steve is always stupid._

The thought comes out of nowhere. The Winter Soldier drops his gun in the snow. His head buzzes. He sees flashes of memory: Steve Rogers except he’s small and scrawny, he’s got his fists up and a bloody nose, and the Winter Soldier knows he has to step in and save him because Steve is always stupid—

The Winter Soldier grabs his rifle and stands up. Snow is starting to blow in, big fluffy flakes. Cuts down on visibility. Good for him. He will worry about Steve Rogers after he has taken care of Maslak. Maybe he will warn him again. Threaten him. Stop him from being so stupid.

The Winter Soldier darts out into the open field. He is wearing white to blend in with the snow, which swirls around him, nearly white-out conditions. But he has fought in these conditions before. He keeps his eye on the golden window. The wind howls. He can feel his blood pumping in his ears. He hopes, when Maslak is dead, that the emptiness inside him will finally start to fill again.

He leaps as he approaches the house, slamming through the window without slowing his pace. The shattering glass sounds like wind chimes. He lands in a crouch in the middle of a rotting, dust-covered parlor. A fire burns in the fireplace. Maslak jumps to his feet from a faded old arm chair. His eyes widen. The Winter Soldier hoists up his gun.

“Holy shit,” Maslak says, “they were right.”

The Winter Soldier walks toward him. The blood is loud in his ears. Maslak stumbles backward, almost falling into the fire. The Winter soldier presses down on the trigger.

Something slams into him. The gunfire flies up, gouging holes in the mantle and the wall and not Maslak. The Winter Soldier reacts without thinking, swinging his gun around to fire at the target. Bullets fly everywhere. The target has a shield. Rogers.

“I told you to leave Russia!” the Winter Soldier roars.

Rogers crouches behind his shield, cheeks flushed, body taut and ready to fight.

“I did,” he says.

The Winter Soldier runs toward him, grabs hold of the shield, yanks it away. Maslak has vanished into the bowels of the house. “Fuck!” the Winter Soldier screams as Rogers slams a fist into the side of his head. He whirls, throwing a punch with his metal arm. Rogers blocks it with the shield and the vibration slams up the Winter Soldier’s spine.

“I can’t let you kill that man, Bucky,” Rogers says.

The name Bucky rattles inside the Winter Soldier’s head. “This has nothing to do with you!” He grabs the shield with both hands and flings both it and Rogers sideways into the wall. Dust falls from the ceiling. The Winter Soldier runs into the dark hallway—where the hell did Maslak go? 

“Not so fast,” says an unfamiliar voice.

There is a tiny sound, a ping, and then painless electricity shoots up the Winter Soldier’s body from his metal arm. He screams, drops his gun, lands hard on the floor. He can’t move.

“Yeah, that’s for my steering wheel,” the voice says.

“Buck?” It’s Rogers again. The Winter Soldier blinks, tries to twist his body around to lunge at him, but all he can do is turn his head. Rogers kneels beside him. His eyes are soft with concern, and the Winter Soldier finds it jolting and strange.

“Let me go,” he snarls. “I told you, this has nothing to do with you.”

Rogers doesn’t say anything. He keeps staring down at him, like he’s trying to conjure up the right words. 

“You’re protecting the wrong man,” the Winter Soldier hisses. “You have no idea what he’s done.”

Rogers blinks. His eyes glimmer and he wipes at them, hard. “I don’t doubt he deserves it,” he finally says, “but killing him isn’t going to change anything.”

The Winter Soldier thinks about the space inside himself, how the deaths of Komissarov and Lukin did nothing to fill it.

“I want to help you,” Rogers says. “Come with us.” He gestures up to Wilson, who has been standing a few paces away, arms crossed over his chest. “Me and Sam. We’ve got a friend who can help you get your memories back.”

The raging in the Winter Soldier’s head goes quiet for a moment. His memories. He looks up at Rogers (at Steve) and for a split second he remembers. The two of them. Sitting together, in a forest, guns lying at their feet. Steve is laughing. He slaps his hand on the Winter’s Soldier’s back and his hand lingers, maybe for a moment too long—

And then that memory is subsumed, and the Winter Soldier is tipping backwards, and falling, falling, the wind rushing cold and biting against his face—

“You’re lying,” the Winter Soldier says.

“No.” Rogers shakes his head. “No, I swear it. I can get help you remember who you are.” His eyes are shining again and when he smiles it just makes him look sadder. “You’re Bucky Barnes. You were my,” his voice wavers, “my best friend. I want to help you.”

The Winter Soldier can not remember trusting anyone, ever, in his life. But he can not remember most of his life, can he? He wonders if what he feels now, this warmth spreading from his chest, if this is trust.

“I want to kill Maslak,” he says.

Rogers says and leans back on his heels. “I can’t let you do that, Buck.”

“Stop calling me that!” The Winter Soldier yanks on his arm. It doesn’t move but he’s able to shift his weight. The paralysis will wear off soon. “Let me kill him and I’ll go with you. That’s my deal.”

Rogers hesitates. He glances over at Wilson. Wilson shrugs.

“I’m supposed to kill you, too,” the Winter Soldier hisses at Rogers. “But you give me this one thing, and I’ll go with you.” He realizes he doesn’t even have to think about it, really. Here is his escape. Fuck Dixon and HYDRA and all the rest of them. And if Rogers can get him out of Belarus, it’ll be easier for him to make his way into Europe to track down Hafner. And maybe he’ll have his memories back. He doubts that, not after so long of them being erased, over and over. His mind is a palimpsest; rub too hard and the paper will tear. But if Rogers, Rogers who makes him feel so inexplicably safe, wants to try, fine.

“Give me Maslak,” the Winter Soldier says. “And I’ll go with you.”

Steve stands up. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. The Winter Soldier is sure he’s going to refuse. 

But then he glances at Wilson. Nods once.

"You sure?" Wilson says.

"No," says Steve. "But do it anyway."

Wilson presses a button on a slim remote. Another painless bolt of electricity, and the Winter Soldier can move again. He jumps to his feet, grabs his gun off the floor. Rogers flinches, looks away. And for a moment the Winter Soldier hesitates— _Steve doesn’t want me to._

Then: _This is wrong._

But then, in the distant hollow of his thoughts, he hears Maslak’s laughter as he lay writhing in pain, and the rage billows up in him. He whirls away, stalks into the dark of the house. He will find Maslak.

But he’ll come back to Rogers, too.

 


End file.
